by Dave Freer
"EEEK!"
The only reason that Lamont didn't join in Medea's shriek was that he still had the gag in his mouth. He did a pretty good shriek despite of it.
Scorpions came crawling by the hundreds out of the smallest cracks . . .
Belatedly, Liz remembered Jerry telling her that Selket was a scorpion goddess, particularly charged with the preservation of the entrails of the dead. Probably, as Lamont said later, because they'd been emptied out so nicely.
"Just lie still!" snapped Liz. "I thought we'd just get one or two. Not thousands." Liz spoke as calmly as she could, as more and more tiny clawed feet made their way down her arms to the ropes.
Which were writhing . . .
Lamont leapt to his feet kicking frantically, his fear of the scorpions totally submerged by his very urgent need to get rid of the rope that had become a uraeus. The knotted cobra that had been a rope hit the wall with an angry hiss. Nobody knows their own strength and sheer determination until they find their ropes turning to cobras. Ten seconds later they were all on their feet in a corner, stamping scorpions and frantically shaking them off their clothes, while three very large, angry Egyptian cobras hissed like about-to-explode kettles in the far corner. Liz untied Lamont's gag. It was bloody. He'd lost a tooth.
"For god's sake, Liz! I am really, really, really scared of snakes. And I ain't too fond of scorpions, neither." Lamont's voice was slightly shaky and definitely high-pitched. "We're just lucky we didn't get bitten!"
Liz looked a bit crestfallen. "I'm sorry. I don't really understand this magic stuff too well."
Lamont raised his eyes to heaven. "Well, why don't you leave it to somebody who does understand it? Like Medea."
Medea's reaction was quite different. She was staring at the cobras and scorpions with admiration. "You must teach me that spell, darling Liz."
Liz glared at Lamont. "Quit grousing! You're the Cushite sorceress. You're the one who's supposed to be doing the spells."
Lamont felt his jaw. "And I've got the lumps and bruises to prove it. Damn Jerry and his crazy ideas!" he said thickly. "I've got a hangover on top of it all."
"Shhh. Somebody's at the door," whispered Liz.
Indeed, outside the cell they could hear a heavy bar being raised. The stone slab door on the far side of the cell swung open to reveal three soldiers, with spears at the ready.
Ready for three prisoners. Less than ready for an equal number of angry Egyptian cobras. The door had just missed one. The three snakes swayed in unison, hoods flared. Which might still have been okay if a scorpion hadn't marched up the one fellow's sandal and set off further upward, exploring cheerfully. The guard's eyes, already the size of golf balls, got wider.
"Kill it, Bedety! Kill it!" The guard's teeth were clenched. He stood as if flash-frozen.
His companion was about to calmly flick it off with a spear point . . . when a scorpion walked onto his foot. The spear point jabbed as he stamped and danced clear.
"Yeow!" yelled the stab victim, as the spear point jabbed him on the inner thigh. Of course the stab missed the scorpion. The alarmed creature scuttled higher, aiming for the safety of the kilt.
"Horus' Eye! The floor is alive with these scorpions!" The third soldier was backing off, his voice shaky.
The scorpion, for which the stab victim was frantically searching under his kilt, must have reacted as frightened scorpions do. The poor man shrieked and flung his spear away. He missed a cobra by a hairsbreadth and nearly took out Liz's toes. The angry cobras struck at the guards. . . .
* * *
Up the passages they could still hear the panic-stricken yells as the guards ran. The words "Cushite sorceress!" were the most frequently repeated. Liz used the abandoned spear to persuade the cobras to let them pass, and the trio walked off into the passages, away from the yelling.
Hearing the sound of panicky female voices added to those of the guards, Liz paused for a moment to study the ornamentation of the hallway.
"Congratulations, Lamont," she chuckled. "I think you've achieved every man's fantasy. We're locked into the Harem."
* * *
The eunuchs guarding the Harem might be lackadaisical in their attitude to prisoners. But as Jerry, Cruz, Mac and Henri had learned, the regular soldiers of Sebek's army were not. Merely being trussed and tossed into a cell would have been the height of luxury for the "official" men of the party. Instead they'd been hung on the ends of offertory poles. Their gags had been refreshed. The poles were long and pivotable, rather like those used for a shaduf. A weight at one end counterbalanced the dangling humans, who were then swung out over the lake. Glancing from side to side, Jerry thought they looked for all the world like a row of fishing poles with baits about to drop into the water.
In the limpid water below, the crocodiles were beginning to gather.
At least they weren't hanging upside-down. On the other hand, that would have meant the crocodiles got the head-end first. Once you'd lost your head, at least your troubles were over. This way it would last longer—although, to judge by the gaping maws, not much longer.
Jerry had been thinking about what was required for Egyptian magic. It was unusual in that mere mortals could, given the correct words and intonation and use of secret names, compel even gods to serve them. All that was required of a magician was that he should be an "appropriately constituted authority."
And he did have a Ph.D., after all. Now if only he had the ability to speak.
* * *
The women in the colonnaded room that Lamont, Liz and Medea had entered were proving that they certainly had the ability to shriek. Their weaving abandoned in a chaos of scattered skeins, they huddled together in the far corner of the room and attempted to deafen their "attackers"—or, at the very least, lift the roof.
"Don't kill us, Sorceress," begged the elderly nineteen-year-old matron of the crowd, who was a veritable Methuselah compared to the others.
"If you don't scream again," said Liz, brandishing the spear.
She might as well have been waving a stick of limp celery for all the attention the scantily clad damsels paid to her. "Eeee!!!!" they shrieked.
"Oh—shut up!" snarled Lamont, clutching his head. "I'm still feeling a bit fragile." He said it in rather a gruff voice.
There was a silence. A long jelly-like silence.
"She's a man," whispered a girl with a particularly ornate hairdo. Her expression went from one of fear to one of predatory interest. "A man!"
* * *
Lamont instantly realized two things, which had taken Faust far more time to understand. Firstly, fantasies are more fun as fantasies than as realities. Secondly, no matter what trouble you're in, it can almost always get worse. A minute later, he had his dress hitched up around his thighs and he was sprinting away with Liz and Medea behind him, and a pack of young women behind them.
"Why did you run?" panted Liz.
Lamont risked a hasty glance back. "There must have been forty women in there. They'd have torn me to shreds. Quick. Up here."
Behind them, Sebek's Harem echoed to the sounds of two packs of relentless hunters. One of the groups of pursuers, the eunuchs, was so heavily laden with jangling charms and amulets that a fast shuffle was all they could manage. The other ranged from scantily clad on down, and were making very good time.
Among the crocodile-god's faults, plainly enough, was neglect of his Harem. Maybe he was cold-blooded. Maybe he preferred lady crocodiles. Or maybe several dozen young women chosen for their attractiveness and high libido were simply too much for one old croc.
Whatever the reason, they were lighter and more effective in their pursuit. And in their effort to elude these faster pursuers, Liz, Medea and Lamont found themselves eventually boxed in. Cornered by both groups, when they finally fled out onto the flat roof.
They backed into the far corner. Only the bickering between the two groups had so far prevented either side's success. Now Lamont, Liz and Medea faced stark choices. Up. Down.
Or capture . . .
Short of flapping their arms very, very fast, "up" was a nonavailable course. "Capture" was, as far as Lamont was concerned, no option either. The pursuing houris had betrayed Lamont's sex to the amulet-laden eunuchs. The Harem guards, clearly enough, were planning to recruit him to their ranks.
That left down. Into the lake. Well, it wasn't more than thirty-five feet. Which is awfully high, until you are faced with such choices.
A drum throbbed in the distance. The sun beat down on the rooftop.
The eunuch guards made no attempt to cut them off from the wall. Nobody would ever dream of leaping over that low balustrade and down into the lake of crocodiles. The eunuchs and the houris watched incredulously as the three hopped up onto the wall.
Medea looked down into the clear water. "I can't swim," she said quietly.
Liz took a firm grip on Medea's tunic. "You concentrate on holding your breath when you hit the water, and don't panic. I'll do the rest."
"Come down from there, you fool fake sorceress!" bellowed the porky chief eunuch-guard. "Before you kill yourself!"
"Why shouldn't I beat you to it?" Lamont swayed on the narrow wall. "I am not a fake sorcerer! Beware lest I call a rain of scorpions and nightsoil on your head. I call on my protective genii Malarky and Prostaglandin to smite you down. May . . . " he needed some names, desperately. He only picked them up to pun with . . . "May Tauret trample your entrails. I summons Bes, may he tear your head off, and push it up your posterior. May Apep spit in your eye . . . "
The porky guard poked his spear at him. The watching houris squealed as Lamont flailed wildly and toppled with a yell off the wall.
"Let's go!" barked Liz. "I don't know how well Lamont swims in a dress."
* * *
Being fed to the crocodiles was bad enough, thought Jerry, but did they have to turn them all into raisins first? It was hot and windless. His head was throbbing.
It seemed unreasonable to die with a headache. Wasn't being eaten alive bad enough? Jerry realized that he was somewhat lightheaded. He was at the stage of feeling as if this life belonged to someone else. Then he realized that the throbbing wasn't actually inside his head. It was someone playing a drum. Slowly and steadily. The offertory poles were being lowered towards the water. The crocodiles were nearly solid under them.
It's at times like these that most brains go on strike. Jerry's brain simply got angry. It wasn't prepared to have its vehicle eaten just yet. There were things it still wanted to think about. It spat out an order: Subvocalize. They're gods, dammit.
Jerry did his best. The gag peeled away.
"I call on the Bes, the defender against noxious creatures.
"I banish you, Creatures of Sebek, by your true name Crocodylus niloticus."
He hoped that was right. He'd gotten it from Liz, the day before, as they'd made their way up the Myth-Nile. It was as close to a "true name" as anyone could come up with.
"Begone! Thrice I tell you.
"Begone. Begone. Begone.
"By Harmakhis, I call on the genii of the east to lambaste and lithify you.
"I call on the genii of the south to pulverize
"and send down plagues of pyretic pustules . . . "
A team of priests was furiously swinging the offertory pole inward. A flung javelin narrowly missed his cheek. Jerry looked down. No crocs . . .
"I call on Osiris, by the names Bennu, Djed, Mendes and Onuphis.
"Make this rope as frail as corn before the sickle.
"Seker, corrupt and rot these bindings—"
"Shit! Doc—NO!" yelled Cruz, as he spat the gag bindings off.
But it was too late by then. They dropped like overripe fruit into the water.
* * *
Cruz had thought that it was all over. He'd been trying to work out whether he could flex his legs enough to kick the first croc on the snout when he'd caught sight of something in the periphery of his vision. It was Lamont, Medea and Liz, on the top of the one wing of the huge temple. Then Doc had suddenly started to spout. Then Lamont had fallen, followed by Liz and Medea jumping. To his horror, he saw crocodiles streaming like arrows towards the three of them, who were threshing their way towards the reedy shore.
In a way, the Doc's incantation had worked. The crocs had left them to seek prey that was already in the water. Then, just as he was able to speak, the ropes parted.
* * *
Liz lost her grip on Medea as they hit the water. Medea having gone rigid, went straight down. Liz took a deep breath and duck-dived after her. She nearly met her head-on coming up. She grabbed the struggling Medea lifesaving style, just as the woman was going down again. The clinging dress was a menace. You couldn't possibly do a scissors kick in it. She grabbed it and ripped. Time enough to worry about appearances if they survived. Those were javelins hitting the water. And not that far away either.
She looked around for Lamont, saw him a few yards off doing a determined doggy-paddle crawl. She looked at Medea, who had stopped struggling but had suddenly given a little moan of fear. Liz saw the cause of Medea's cry. There was a V of crocodiles coming for them, led by a monster. A crocodile at least twenty-four feet long. More like a ship than a croc. It had a golden collar, and golden rings through the eye-ridges. And that switching tail drove it through the water like an oversized outboard motor.
Then she saw the others about a hundred yards off, splashing down into the water.
The crocodiles were closing in. They swam faster than the three of them could. They'd get Lamont first. Liz wanted to close her eyes. She just didn't know what she could do. For one of the few times in her life, Elizabeth Maria De Beer was at a total loss. She wanted to scream.
Water erupted around Lamont.
Liz screamed.
35
To get to the other side,
for some fowl reason.
It rose like Leviathan. Water streamed from the gray expanse. Liz saw Lamont, facing the tail end, cling desperately to the broadness of a giant hippopotamus' back. It threw back its massive head, exposing huge teeth, and gave that peculiar groaning bellow which is a hippo's warning cry.
Liz was too frightened to speak. She was nearly too frightened to swim. Hippos kill far more people every year in Africa than crocodiles do. They're curious, territorial, dangerous, enormous and fast.
This one seemed to have an aversion to crocodiles. Normally, hippos treat crocodiles with contempt and occasionally to a spot of abuse. Normally, hippos work cooperatively in herds to make this possible. But this one, having bellowed its challenge, was heading for the shore along with its clinging and wild-eyed passenger.
* * *
Jerry realized, too late, that the crocodiles hadn't "begone" very far. That they were likely to reach the others before they could gain the shore—and then he plunged into the lake himself. The sacrificial victims had a far, far longer swim ahead of them than Lamont, Medea and Liz.
He went down like a stone, and then rose to the surface, spluttering. The water was prickled with javelins. And then something knocked stones flying from the temple wall. The huge squared blocks could have killed him, but they'd missed. And at least the javelins had stopped.
A gruff voice spoke from the water beside him. "Well, foreigner. You do like to lead an exciting life, don't you?"
It was Bes. Somehow, sharing crocodile-infested water with the protector was a lot more comforting.
"We must . . . " A wave hit him in the face. He choked and spluttered. "Help the others, Bes! Crocodiles!"
Bes chuckled, treading water. "Between Tauret and the sphinxes, the crocodiles haven't got a holy Shu's chance in a furnace. A pity. I feel like knocking old Petesuchos, the king crocodile, about a bit. Establishes a decent respect."
Jerry realized he'd swallowed an awful lot of water. Then he saw a winged monster snatch Cruz from the water.
"She'll be back for you, in a minute or two," said Bes.
"But that's the Greek sphinx! What's she
doing here? And isn't she just going to eat him?"
"Not if he can answer her riddle." Bes grinned even more broadly. "And that one was old when Nun the first god was a boy." In a hoarse singsong: "What walks with four legs . . . "
A short while later, Jerry found himself transported to shore, some distance from the temple. Henri and Cruz were already there. So were Liz, Medea and a pale gray Lamont. There was also an enormous woman with a gray hippo head, which was beaded with pink sweat. And the gigantic Egyptian sphinx. With his nose still attached. It had, after all, only been hacked off by a Muslim zealot in the fifteenth century. Squatting alongside the Greek sphinx, the Egyptian one made even that monster seemed small.
"Well, Jerry," said Lamont in a shaky voice. "You know, for a moment there I thought I saw Chicago again. It was so real!"
Jerry swallowed. His entire stomach seemed to be a bag of water. "For a moment you were nearly dead then," he said quietly.
The Egyptian sphinx was colored red, blue and yellow, which the Pharaoh Thutmose IV had had it painted. Jerry leaned his head against the huge forepaw and was thoroughly sick. Fortunately for him, the giant sphinx seemed more bemused by the episode than anything else. Even, perhaps, a little apprehensive.
"Is it something I said?" rumbled the avalanche voice.
* * *
"I thought about your offer," said the Greek sphinx to Lamont. "And I'll take you up on it. Another riddle for my help."
Lamont sat upright. He'd been cradling his head in his hands, feeling sorry for himself. "All right. But no eating anyone you've been introduced to. What do you think, Jerry?"
Jerry sat upright, from where he'd flopped against the big stone-but-alive Egyptian sphinx's legs. "Hell. What do you mean, Lamont? You want a riddle? I dunno. 'Why does the chicken cross the road?' "
Lamont gave a wry grin. "That'll do. Why does the chicken cross the road, sphinx?"
"I don't know. Tell me," demanded the Greek sphinx.
"Not until I introduce you to everyone," said Lamont dryly.
