by Kai Meyer
“If she still is your friend.” It wasn’t the first time that the Flowing Queen had read her thoughts; the bad habit had begun way back.
“Of course she is!”
“You saw her. And heard what she said. Friends do not behave that way.”
“That’s the Stone Light. Junipa couldn’t help it.”
“That changes little about the fact that she may try to do you harm.”
Merle didn’t answer. They were floating a good ten yards over the nearest pyramid step. Gradually Vermithrax’s firm grip began to hurt.
“Set us down,” she asked him once more.
“At least the pyramid appears to be stable,” the lion agreed.
“Does that mean we can look at the bark?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But there’s nothing moving down there. If there are really mummies in there, they must be—”
“Dead?” the Queen asked pointedly.
“Out of action.”
“Maybe. Or maybe not.”
“Those are just exactly the sort of remarks we need,” said Merle caustically.
Vermithrax had made his decision. With gentle wing beats he brought Junipa and Merle back to secure ground—as secure as four-thousand-year-old pyramids situated over an entrance to Hell are.
He first set Merle down on one of the stone steps. After she was able to stand, she carefully took Junipa from Vermithrax’s grasp. Junipa’s lips were still moving. Weren’t her eyes open a crack now? Merle thought she saw the mirror glass under the lids.
Slowly she let her friend down into the snow. She was burning to run over to the bark, but she had to take care of Junipa first.
She gently stroked Junipa’s cheek. When her frozen fingers touched the skin, it was as if ice met ice. She wondered how long it would be before the first frostbite showed.
“Junipa,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
From the corner of her eye she saw Vermithrax’s glowing body tense, noticed the mighty muscle cords that clenched under the obsidian-like fists. The lion was ready to respond to an attack immediately. And his distrust was directed not toward the sunbark alone. Junipa’s treachery had made him just as mistrustful as the Queen, only he didn’t show it so openly.
The girl’s eyelids fluttered, then opened hesitantly. Merle saw her own face reflected in the mirror shards Junipa had for eyes. She hardly recognized herself. As if someone had shown her a picture of a snowman, with iceencrusted hair and blue-white skin.
We need warmth, she thought with alarm. We’ll die here outside.
“Merle,” came weakly from Junipa’s chapped lips. “I … You have …” Then she fell silent again and clutched the hem of Merle’s dress. “It’s so cold. Where … are we?”
“In Egypt.” Although she said it herself, it seemed as absurd to Merle as if she’d said “On the moon.”
Junipa stared at her with her mirror eyes, but the gleaming glass betrayed none of her thoughts. When the magic mirror maker Arcimboldo had implanted them in her and made the blind girl see, Merle had found the gaze of the mirrors cold; but the feeling had never been as appropriate as it was now, in the middle of this new ice age.
“Egypt …” Junipa sounded hoarse but no longer as indifferent as she had inside the pyramid, when she’d tried to talk Merle into remaining in Hell. A breath of hope rose in Merle. Had the Stone Light lost its power over Junipa up here?
From the direction of the bark came a metallic sound, followed by creaking.
With a threatening growl, Vermithrax whirled around. Again the ground trembled under his feet.
At the side of the bark—in the wall now facing skyward—a section of the metal snapped outward and stood there for a moment, trembling like an upright insect’s wing.
Vermithrax pushed protectively in front of the girls, blocking Merle’s view. She almost put her neck out of joint in order to see between his legs.
Something worked itself out of the opening. Not a mummy soldier. Not a priest.
“A sphinx,” whispered the Flowing Queen.
The creature had the upper body of a man, whose hips merged into the body of a lion, with sand-colored fur, four muscular legs, and razor-sharp wild animal claws. He appeared not to be aware of Vermithrax and the girls at all, he was so battered by the crash. Blood was flowing into his fur from several contusions; a gouge in his head was particularly deep. After several attempts, he managed to climb feebly out of the hatch, until in the end he lost his balance, rolled over the edge of the bark’s fuselage, and fell. He crashed onto the next lower step, as hard as a fullgrown buffalo. His blood sprinkled the snow. He lay there, unmoving.
“Is he dead?” asked Merle.
Vermithrax stamped through the snow up to the bark and looked down at the sphinx. “Looks pretty much like it.”
“Do you think there are more inside?”
“I’m going to look.” He approached the bark in stalking position, low to the ground and with mane on end.
“If the bark was only a scout, what was a sphinx doing on board?” asked the Queen. “Normally a priest is available for such tasks.”
Merle didn’t know too much about the hierarchy of the Egyptian Empire, but she did know that the sphinxes ordinarily occupied the most important positions. Only the high priests of Horus stood between them and Pharaoh Amenophis.
Vermithrax climbed onto the fuselage as agilely as a young cat. Only the soft scratching of his claws on the metal betrayed him. But if there were actually anyone still alive inside, their voices would have warned him long before.
“Why a sphinx?” asked the Queen once more.
“How should I know?”
Junipa’s hand felt for Merle’s. Their fingers closed around each other’s. In spite of the tension, Merle was relieved. At least for the moment, it appeared that the Stone Light had lost its influence over Junipa. Or its interest in her.
Vermithrax, still prowling, covered the last distance to the open hatch. He pushed his gigantic front claws to the edge of the opening, stretched his neck forward, and looked down.
The attack they were all expecting did not come.
Vermithrax walked all around each part of the hatch that was not obscured by the open cover. He looked into the interior from all sides.
“I am so cold!” Junipa’s voice sounded as if she were far away in her thoughts, as if her mind had still not processed what had happened.
Merle pulled her closer, but her eyes remained fixed on Vermithrax.
“He will not go inside there,” said the Queen.
What do you want to bet? Merle thought.
The obsidian lion made an abrupt leap. His powerful body just fit through the opening, and as he disappeared inside, its outline glowed. From one moment to the next, their surroundings became gray and colorless. For the first time Merle became conscious of how very much his brightness had made the icy surface around them sparkle.
She waited for a noise, the sound of battle, cries and roars and the hollow crashing of bodies banging against the bark’s fuselage. But it remained quiet, so quiet that now she began to really worry about Vermithrax.
“Do you think something’s happened to him?” she asked the Queen, but then she saw Junipa shrug her shoulders wearily because Merle had spoken the question aloud. Of course after all she’d been through, Junipa had probably forgotten what had happened to Merle. Who could really believe that the Flowing Queen—a legend, an incomprehensible power of whom the Venetians whispered reverently—would one day be living in Merle’s mind?
So much had happened since then. Merle wanted nothing more than to tell Junipa of her adventures, of her journey through Hell, where they hoped to find help against the overwhelming Empire. But instead they’d found only sorrow and danger and the Stone Light waiting for them. But Junipa, too. Merle was burning to find out her story. She wanted to rest somewhere and do what she’d done with her friend before, night after night: talk with each other.
&nb
sp; A metallic clang sounded from inside the bark.
“Vermithrax?”
The lion did not answer.
Merle looked at Junipa. “Can you stand up?”
A dark shadow passed over the mirror eyes. It took a moment for Merle to realize that it was only the reflection of a raptor that was flying over their heads.
“I can try,” said Junipa. She sounded so weak that Merle had serious doubts.
Junipa struggled to her feet; heaven only knew where she got the strength. But then Merle remembered how the fragment of the Stone Light in Junipa’s chest had healed her wounds in seconds.
Junipa stood up and dragged herself closer to the bark along with Merle.
“Do you mean to climb down there after him?” the Queen asked in alarm.
Someone has to see about him. Merle thought.
Secretly the Queen was just as worried about Vermithrax as Merle was, and she didn’t conceal this feeling especially well: Merle felt the Queen’s unrest as if it were her own.
Just before she reached the farthest tip of the curving fuselage she looked down at the lifeless sphinx two yards deeper in the snow. He had lost still more blood. It fanned out like an irregular red star, pointing in all directions. The blood was already beginning to freeze.
Merle looked up at the hatch again, but the fuselage of the bark was too high and they’d come too close to be able to see the opening now. It wouldn’t be easy to climb up on the smooth surface.
A loud crack made them jump, yet it instantly resolved their fears.
Vermithrax was again perched on the fuselage. He had catapulted out of the hatch in one leap and was looking down at the girls with gentle lion eyes.
“Empty,” he said.
“Empty?”
“No human, no mummy, and no priests.”
“That is impossible,” said the Queen in Merle’s thoughts. “The Horus priests would not allow the sphinxes to go on patrol alone. Priests and sphinxes hate each other like poison.”
You know a whole lot about them, Merle thought.
“I have protected Venice from the Empire and its powers as long as I could. Do you really wonder that I learned at least a little about them from experience?”
Vermithrax unfolded one wing and lifted first Merle, then, hesitantly, Junipa beside him on the golden fuselage of the bark. The lion pointed to the hatch. “Climb inside. It’s warmer inside there. At least you won’t freeze to death.”
He had scarcely finished speaking when something gigantic, massive rose up from the emptiness beside the wreck and landed on the fuselage behind the girls with a wet, thumping sound. Before Merle realized it, Junipa’s hand was snatched from her own.
She whirled around. Before her stood the wounded sphinx, holding Junipa in his huge hands. She looked even more fragile than before, like a toy in the claws of that beast.
She didn’t scream, she only whispered Merle’s name, and then she was utterly silent.
Vermithrax was about to shove Merle to one side to better get at the sphinx on the bark. But the creature shook his head, with effort, as if every movement cost him hideous pain. Blood dripped from his head wound onto Junipa’s hair and froze solid.
I’ll tear the child to pieces,” he got out with difficulty, in Merle’s language, but with an accent that sounded as if his tongue were swollen; perhaps it actually was.
“Say nothing.” The voice of the Queen sounded imploring. “Let Vermithrax deal with it.”
But Junipa—, Merle began.
“He knows what to do.”
Merle’s eyes fastened on Junipa’s face. The girl’s fear seemed to freeze on her features. Only the mirror eyes remained cold and detached.
“Don’t come any nearer,” said the sphinx. “She will die.”
Vermithrax’s lion tail thrashed slowly from one side to the other, back and forth, again and again. A shrill squeal sounded as he extended his claws and the points scratched on the fuselage.
The sphinx’s situation was hopeless. In a fight he wouldn’t have been able to do anything against Vermithrax. And yet he armed himself in his own way: He held Junipa in his grip and used her like a shield. Her feet were dangling twenty inches off the surface.
Merle noticed that the sphinx was not standing securely. He had bent his right foreleg just enough that the ball of the paw no longer touched the snow. He was in pain and in despair. That made him unpredictable.
Merle forgot the cold, the icy wind, even her fear. “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” she said to Junipa, not certain whether her voice would reach her friend. Junipa looked as if with each breath she was pulling back into herself a little deeper.
Vermithrax took a step toward the sphinx, who evaded him, grasping his hostage tightly.
“Stay where you are,” he said in a strained voice. The glow of the obsidian lion was mirrored in his eyes. He didn’t understand who or what was standing there before him: a mighty winged lion, who shone like freshly wrought iron—never before had the sphinx seen such a creature.
This time Vermithrax obeyed the demand and halted. “What is your name, sphinx?” he asked in a growl.
“Simphater.”
“Good, Simphater, then consider. If you harm a hair of the girl, I will kill you. You know that I can do it. So quickly that you won’t even feel it. But also slowly, if you make me angry.”
Simphater blinked. Blood was running into his left eye, but he hadn’t a hand free to wipe it away. “Stay where you are!”
“You already said that.”
Merle saw how every sinew and muscle in the sphinx’s arms strained. He changed his grip, grabbed Junipa by both her upper arms, and held her out in the air.
He’s going to tear her apart, she thought in a panic. He’ll simply break her in two!
“No,” said the Queen without any real conviction.
He’s going to kill her. The pain is driving him mad.
“Sphinxes can tolerate much more pain than you humans.”
Vermithrax radiated endless patience. “Simphater, you’re a soldier, and I won’t try to lie to you. You know that I can’t let you go. Nevertheless, I have no interest in your death. You can fly this bark, and we want to get away from here. That’s very convenient, don’t you think?”
“Why the bark?” said Simphater with irritation. “We fought up there. You can fly. You don’t need me.”
“I don’t. But the girls. A flight on my back in this cold would kill them in a few minutes.”
Simphater’s blurry eyes wandered over Merle and the lion, then hovered over the dazzling white of the endless snow fields. “Did you do that?”
Vermithrax raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“The ice. It doesn’t snow in this desert … it never did before.”
“Not we,” said Vermithrax. “But we know who is responsible for it. And he is a powerful friend.”
Again the sphinx blinked. He seemed to be weighing whether Vermithrax was lying to him. Was the lion just trying to make him unsure? His tail switched back and forth, and a drop of sweat appeared on his forehead, despite the icy cold.
Merle held her breath. Suddenly Simphater nodded almost imperceptibly and set Junipa down gently. She only realized what was happening to her when her feet touched the golden surface of the bark. Stumbling, she ran over to Merle. The two embraced each other, but Merle did not go below. She wanted to look the sphinx in the eye.
Vermithrax had not moved. He and Simphater stared at each other.
“You are keeping your word?” asked the sphinx, sounding almost astonished.
“Certainly. If you get us away from here.”
“And do not try any magic tricks,” Merle added, but now it was the voice of the Queen who spoke out of her. “I know the sphinx magic, and I will know if you try to use it.”
Simphater stared at Merle in surprise and seemed to be asking himself whether he’d underestimated the girl at the lion’s side.
No one was more astonished at
her words than Merle herself, but she made no attempt to deny the Queen the use of her tongue—even though she’d found out that she could do it.
“No magic,” said the Queen, once more through Merle’s mouth. And then she added some words to it, which belonged neither to Merle’s vocabulary nor to that of any other human being. They belonged to the language of the sphinxes, and their import seemed to impress Simphater deeply. Once more he eyed Merle suspiciously, then his expression changed to one of respect. He lowered his head and bowed humbly.
“I will do what you desire,” he said.
Junipa looked confused, but Vermithrax knew well who spoke from Merle. Better than any human he sensed the presence of the Queen, and Merle had asked herself more than once what constituted the bond between the spirit creature inside her and the obsidian lion.
“You get in first,” he said to Simphater, pointing to the hatch.
The sphinx nodded. His paws left red impressions in the snow.
A shrill cry resounded over the icy plain, so piercing that Merle and Junipa put their hands over their ears. The scream reverberated over the landscape, out to the scattered snow pyramids in the distance. The ice crust cracked, and at the edges of the steps above and below the bark, icicles broke off and bored six feet deeper into the snow.
Merle knew that sound.
The cry of a falcon.
Simphater froze.
Over the horizon appeared the outline of a gigantic raptor, many times higher than all the pyramids, feathered in gold and with wings so huge it looked as if he intended to embrace the world. When he spread them, they triggered a raging snowstorm.
Merle watched as the icy masses of the plain were whipped and whirled up to them as a white cloud wall; just before they reached the pyramid they lost their strength and collapsed. The gigantic falcon opened his beak and again let out the high scream, still louder this time, and now all around them the snow was in motion, trembling and vibrating as if there were an earthquake. Junipa clung to Merle, and Merle instinctively clutched at Vermithrax’s long mane.
Simphater lapsed into utter panic, shrank back with wide eyes, lost his balance on the smooth fuselage of the sunbark, and skittered over the edge into empty space, this time with much greater momentum than before. The next pyramid step did not stop him; he fell farther down, his long legs snapped, his head cracked several times on ice and stone, and the sphinx finally came to rest at the foot of the pyramid, many steps and yards below them, twisted so unnaturally that there could be no doubt that he was dead.
