Oath Bound - Book V of The Order of the Air

by Melissa Scott

  “— bombed the hospital,” von Rosen shouted. “We have to do something —”

  Lewis closed his mind to that, too, shoving his throttle forward. Full power, and the bombers were still pulling away.

  “Potez Five, Breda,” Robinson said, his voice sharp in the headphones. “Break off and return to base. You can’t catch them.”

  For a heartbeat, Lewis ignored him, figuring power and angles. But Robinson was right, none of their planes had the speed to catch the Italians; on top of that, he had no idea how much fuel he had left. “Roger, Colonel,” he said, and turned reluctantly back toward the airfield.

  “We can’t just leave them,” von Rosen protested. “We must go after them.”

  “Colonel’s right,” Mitch said. “They’re too fast, and I’m damn near out of fuel. Check your gauges, von Rosen.”

  There was a pause, and then a sigh from von Rosen. “Very well.”

  The airfield was barely touched, as though it hadn’t been the target at all, just a couple of potholes on the apron in front of the hangar. “Bastards,” Lewis muttered, and took his place in line behind the Breda.

  It took all his patience to taxi Potez Five to the hangar entrance, and he abandoned it there, flinging himself out of the cockpit. The air smelled of cordite and garlic and his eyes filled instantly with tears.

  “Alma!”

  Mitch caught his arm. “Wait.”

  Lewis jerked himself free. “Alma!”

  There was no one in the hangar, no one in the office. The village…

  The clouds of mustard gas had dissipated, blown away by the freshening wind, but columns of smoke rose here and there. White tents flapped in the wind still marked with the red cross. She was an ambulance medic first. Alma would be with the wounded.

  Lewis wasn’t sure how he got down the hill, Mitch close behind him. People moving through the clearing smoke, and others not moving…

  “Morphine! I need morphine!” He heard her shout, saw the golden flag of her hair, Alma kneeling beside a man who twisted in agony, blood and bile and the bright red of his own lungs streaming from his nose and mouth. A bomb splinter had gone through his chest, a splinter of ribs showing at the edge of the wound. “Morphine!” Alma shouted again, holding him across her body, trying to keep him from aspirating his own blood, though he had nothing left to breathe in with. It was too late. His eyes rolled up, limbs stiffening in one long tremor before he collapsed in a rush.

  Beside her on the ground lay her jacket. For a moment Lewis thought she’d just taken it off, and then he saw the pair of small feet sticking out beneath it, paler on the soles of the feet, no bigger than Dora’s.

  Alma laid the man back gently, her arms soaked to the elbows with his scarlet blood. She looked up and saw him and got to her feet. Her eyes were bright not with tears but with fury. “Hear me, Sekhmet!” she snarled. “Hear me, Lion Headed Lady, Mother of Ethiopia! I will bring them down. I will bring them down into dust!”

  Behind her a woman cast herself on the ground with a scream that should have split open the sky, throwing the jacket aside and snatching up the tiny, bloodied corpse, the little boy’s head lolling back.

  Alma’s voice shook. “I will destroy them! Lady of the Desert, hear my oath! I will destroy them.”

  “I know,” Lewis said.

  She took one long breath. Then her eyes focused on something behind him and he turned to see a young man sitting outside one of the tents, eyes unfocused with shock, blood pouring down his leg from a bullet that had passed through the calf. “Lewis, give me your tie for a tourniquet.” Alma scrambled over the dead man and Lewis followed. “Let me see your leg. Come now.” She went to her knees beside him, searching for the bullet hole with her fingers.

  “Show me what to do,” Lewis said.

  The war began now.

  Alexandria, Egypt

  January 4, 1936

  Jerry wasn’t sure how long they traveled in darkness. Sometimes they crawled through sewer tunnels long dry. Sometimes they walked through galleries of stone, through wonderlands of pillars and columns carved fantastically and beautifully, a garden beneath the city frozen in attitudes of wonder, catacombs and cisterns, tombs and temples. Once they had to climb through precariously balanced slabs where an earthquake had brought down part of the ceiling, Jerry crawling between marble facings carved like the Rosetta stone in hieroglyphics and Greek letters both.

  “If we get stuck this will be our tomb too,” Willi muttered behind him, and Jerry could only think it was fitting. What better tomb could a man want?

  At last they came to a junction of ways, the ceiling high enough to stand erect, as if they stood at the crossings of some underground street, the cobbles smooth beneath their feet. Hussein flashed the light around the walls. “I have no idea where we are,” he said.

  “We know the direction but not the path,” Jerry said. A hundred rooms, a thousand passages, all beneath the earth… Finding a way out, much less finding the Soma, seemed almost impossible.

  “Check the compass again,” Willi said.

  Jerry felt in his coat pocket for the compass in its case. Instead his hand encountered a handkerchief-wrapped bundle: Iskinder’s pectoral. It was warm, almost hot to the touch. He jerked his fingers away. Then he deliberately reached for it and drew it out.

  Hussein turned around, looking at it keenly as Jerry unwrapped the handkerchief. “What’s that?”

  “A Ptolemaic pectoral,” Jerry said. “It belongs to the Emperor of Ethiopia. A friend gave it to me for safekeeping.” The last fold fell away. Ruddy gold gleamed, cabochon rubies throwing back the light of the flashlight. Isis bent her protective wings over Pharaoh, Ptolemy Philadelphus enthroned. “The Strong Youth Who His Father Has Raised to the Throne,” Jerry said. “The second Ptolemy, the one who built the original Soma, or at least who presided over its dedication.”

  “I thought we didn’t know that,” Hussein said, a faint frown between his brows. “I thought we didn’t know exactly when the Soma was dedicated.”

  “At Philadelphus’ coronation,” Jerry said. “That was when they brought Alexander’s body here from Memphis.” He could see the procession in the streets, winding its way between buildings, Alexander’s hearse approaching at last the place prepared for him. He could almost hear the roar of the crowd become respectful silence as the hearse passed…

  “The pectoral may commemorate that coronation,” Willi said. “You said that’s what the inscription said. A gift from the young pharaoh to his mother.”

  A chill ran down Jerry’s back. “It was the same day,” he said softly. “The same day. The same gold. The same craftsmen. The same hands.” He turned the pectoral over in his own hands thoughtfully. Alma would be able to do this. This was her element. It wasn’t his, but perhaps down here the correspondence was strong enough. And the pectoral was awake, questing, brought once again to its ancient charge by Iskinder’s shed blood. “Blood of the Ptolemies,” he whispered. Iskinder’s blood on the gold, where an assassin’s knife had turned and spared his heart. How long does it take for the genetic markers in blood to change? More than a mere two thousand years…

  Jerry looked up. “Do you have any string? Either of you?”

  Willi frowned. “What?”

  “I have the rope,” Hussein said. “I could cut off a piece of it with my pocket knife and unravel it.”

  “Perfect,” Jerry said. “About so long.”

  “What are you doing?” Willi said. His voice was neutral, but Jerry winced. He knew how much Willi hated anything that smacked of the occult. It was beyond disbelief to active distrust born of the horrible ways he’d seen it used before.

  Jerry met his eyes. “Do you trust me?”

  “What are you going to do?” Willi didn’t look away.

  “I’m going to dowse for the Soma. I’m going to use the pectoral to home in on the other things that were made by the same hands and dedicated on the same day — Alexander’s grave goods.”
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  Hussein blew out a long breath. “I’m in,” he said nervously. He looked from one to the other. “This is the Soma!”

  Jerry held Willi’s eyes, willing him to agree.

  “You give me your word that you will invoke nothing, that you will conjure nothing?”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. He didn’t add that if there was conjuring to be done he had already done it, calling upon Agathos Daimon in the cisterns of Alexandria.

  “Then do it,” Willi said.

  Jerry took the length of fiber that Hussein produced, threading it through the pectoral and suspending it beneath the loop so that it hung freely on the string. It was heavy. He closed his eyes. “Show me,” he whispered.

  Like to like. Gold to gold. The work of the hands of craftsmen who had made this, the touch of hands that had hallowed it…

  …a woman’s hands, plump and middle aged, decorated with golden rings. She had held this with delight, joy in its beauty and pride in the young man it represented, her son. Her blood, her touch, was not unfamiliar at all, Iskinder’s distant foremother who had first worn this…

  “Berenice,” Jerry said quietly. “Berenice.”

  It had rested against her chest, rested on a chain against her heart as she cut a lock of her hair with a silvered knife, brown streaked heavily with gray. She had laid it with two others, one brown and one entirely white, laid it on the lid of the sarcophagus, the first mourners of so many. She had thought, placing it there, of the man who lay inside preserved by the embalmer’s art, forever young and beautiful as she remembered him from their mutual youth, not transformed as she was by age and the fruition of dreams.

  “Berenice, Egypt’s queen,” Jerry whispered. “She put a lock of her hair in the coffin with that of her husband and her son…”

  The pectoral pulled, a leash tightening. Like to like, one thing to another. Iskinder’s blood, Berenice’s hair…

  “This way,” he said, without opening his eyes. “Alexander is this way.”

  Camp Coleman, Amhara Region, Ethiopia

  January 4, 1936

  The worst thing about mustard gas was that it took time to take effect. Mitch stood on the edge of the road, looking down the steep embankment into the village itself. The houses were all in the lower ground, where the gas would collect, though the pallisaded church and the Red Cross tent stood a bit higher. Alma had already pulled a young man up the slope away from the tent, and as he watched, two men carried a woman from one of the huts and laid her on the embankment, then plunged back toward the village. They had tied strips of damp cloth over their faces, but Mitch doubted they’d be much protection.

  “Decontamination,” Iskinder said, coming up at Mitch’s side. “Dr. Biniam!”

  A white-coated man emerged from the Red Cross tent, his face hidden beneath a clumsy gas mask. He lifted a hand in answer, but turned to the nearest soldiers. They ducked back into the tent, and emerged again carrying the flimsy wood-and-canvas stretchers Mitch remembered from the war.

  “Get them up to our barracks,” Robinson said. “The wounded. We’ve got our own well, we can wash the damn stuff off them —”

  “Yes,” Iskinder said, and started down the hill. “Dr. Biniam!”

  Mitch started to follow, but Robinson caught his shoulder. “Cover your face. The gas won’t be gone yet.”

  Mitch nodded, and dragged his handkerchief out of his pocket. He knew that, had learned it all too well back in Italy, but it was easy to forget when there were people injured. Robinson offered a canteen and Mitch soaked the thin cloth, then tied it over his nose and mouth. It wouldn’t protect his eyes, but if they could get in and out quickly enough, he thought they’d be all right.

  It was like being in Italy again, caught behind the lines after the bombers came through. A man in a long robe that looked like a priest’s gown was marshaling the unwounded civilians, sending them up the hill to the road, where a couple of Robinson’s pilots were already waiting. Children were crying, and a man’s voice choked with pain rose in curse or prayer. A woman knelt wailing beside the body of a child. Biniam scrambled from one crumpled body to the next, waving the stretcher-bearers on when he found no signs of life, and leaving them to lift the wounded to safety. He said something as they approached, the mask muffling his words, but Iskinder nodded, and turned toward the tent.

  “We can use the cots to carry people, too.”

  Robinson was getting his own men organized, fresh teams to carry the stretchers, the men who had been helping sent back up the hill to get the gas washed off them. Half an hour, Mitch remembered, you had maybe half an hour before the blisters came and the burns started, and if you’d breathed it in, there was nothing at all you could do. He remembered Gil standing on the runway’s edge, shouting for everyone to get moving, get their masks on, while the oily, stinking cloud rolled over them like a wave.

  There was no time for memory, not when it wouldn’t help. He shook himself, and reached for the last of the stretchers that waited by the tent’s door. One of the soldiers took it from him, and he quickly folded the legs of an empty cot and handed that out as well.

  “There are more wounded here,” Iskinder said, from the opening in the partition that divided the tent. “Three more.”

  Mitch came to join him, wincing at the sight. The Red Cross had done their best, but none of them looked good; two were shot through the body, heavy bandages still showing spots of blood. The third had his entire head wrapped in bandages, with just slits left for nose and mouth, and his left arm was bandaged as well. “Fresh bandages,” Mitch said, and Iskinder nodded.

  “Once we get them out of here.” He hesitated for a moment, then pointed to the man nearest the door. “Let’s go.”

  Mitch hoisted the foot of the cot — less weight than he would have expected, which was a mercy — and the man in the next bed dragged himself up on one elbow, calling after them in what Mitch assumed was Amharic. Iskinder answered in the same language, his voice soothing, and then they were through the door.

  “I told him we would be back as soon as we could,” Iskinder said, grimacing, and Mitch winced in sympathy, feeling his own scars pull. As they wrestled the cot out into the open, he smelled garlic again, droplets of the gas stirred up from the contaminated ground.

  “They’ll never be able to move back here,” he said, in spite of himself, and Iskinder shook his head.

  “Maybe, if it were all burned, and then rebuilt?” He winced again, and lowered his end of the cot. “Just a moment, here.”

  Mitch set his own end down gratefully, and another group of solders trotted over. Their leader, a tall man with sergeant’s stripes, spoke deferentially to Iskinder in Amharic, and Iskinder answered in the same language.

  “They say the village is nearly clear,” he added, to Mitch. “They’ll help these men.”

  “We should get on, then,” Mitch said, after only a heartbeat’s hesitation. It felt wrong to leave with anything left undone, but Iskinder’s wound was only half-healed, and he himself would never be able to carry a heavy load without risk.

  It was eerily quiet in the village. Mitch could hear goats bleating in the distance, and saw a gang of soldiers fanning out to the south to round up what he guessed was the villagers’ strayed livestock. He could see a pen with a broken fence, and winced at the thought of trying to decontaminate a herd of goats. But the alternative was to slaughter the worst hurt rather than let them suffer, and hope some of them survived. Bodies still lay in the dirt, covered now with thin white sheets, and Mitch flinched again at the memory of war. You had to bury them, but the living came first.

  Beside the church, a woman knelt in the dirt, the body of a boy no older than Merilee in her arms. Her face was streaked with tears, and already the first gas blisters were rising on her bare arms. A young man in white robes like a priest’s bent over her, urging her to rise, but she shook her head, rocking back and forth over the body. The priest looked up at their approach, saying something urgent in Amharic
, and Iskinder went to one knee beside the woman, speaking gently. The priest straightened, meeting Mitch’s gaze with a gesture of despair.

  “She will not leave her son.”

  Iskinder kept talking, and the woman wailed aloud. The priest spoke as well, low and urgent, and at last the woman allowed him to take the body from her and lay it gently against the church’s wall. Iskinder tried to help the woman to her feet, but she collapsed, legs sprawling — not unconscious, Mitch though, but utterly overcome.

  “Come on, ma’am,” he said, and together he and the priest got her to her feet. There were blisters on her face as well, and down her legs where her dress rode up her calf; her eyes were red with more than tears, the lids swollen, and she clutched at Mitch’s sleeve, gasping something he couldn’t understand.

  “She says she can’t see,” Iskinder said, his voice tight. “We must get her to Camp Coleman.”

  Mitch and the priest clasped hands, and Iskinder got the woman settled between them, exhorting her to hold on. She draped her arms around their necks, moaning softly, and with an effort they got her up the slope to the road.

  Alma and the Red Cross staff had set up a decontamination station out back of the barracks, close enough to the well that they’d been able to run a hose from the pump, and soldiers were taking turns working the pump handle while another man stood naked under the stream. Another group was collecting contaminated clothes in a basket, and Alma emerged from the barracks as they approached.