Black Ops

by Alan Baxter

  “There was a time,” she said, “not so long ago, when you would run to me with skinned knees, or begging honeyed dates.”

  “I was a child then, my queen.”

  “Yes. You and Mahenef, like brothers, as if I’d borne two sons.”

  She placed the tray between them, on a low stool carved in the overarching likeness of Geb and Nut. Along with the small loaves of emmer-bread were boiled quail’s eggs and a plate of sliced cold meats in pomegranate sauce.

  “The pair of you,” she went on, smoothing her fine linen garment as she sat. “Up trees, and down wells, and into everything. We despaired of what to do.”

  “As I recall,” Khemet said, “you threatened more than once to take us by the side-locks of our hair and knock our heads together.”

  Neferisu laughed again. “But I never did.”

  “No. You were always kind.” He rubbed the side of his shaven, oiled scalp, his side-lock long since a thing of the past. “Though I would gladly have my head knocked, if it meant seeing Mahenef again in this world’s life.”

  “He will be waiting for you in the Seven Halls,” she said. “Then, let your boyish mischiefs be the problem of Osiris.”

  “My boyish mischiefs may be well behind me now, my queen.” His eyes had gone dark. “You know what I am, what I’ve become.”

  “A guest who has not yet touched his refreshment,” she said, regarding him with a look of gentle chiding over the rim of her cup.

  Khemet sighed, picking up a piece of bread, dipping it in wine. “You make it very difficult to be a dangerous figure, dark, and grim.”

  “Be at ease. That is why I’ve summoned you, for a business dark and grim.”

  * * *

  Firelight dances down the tower’s mirrored throat, casting caught radiance from the bronze brazier above to lavish chambers below.

  By day, the sun’s own reflected light itself illuminates the murals – bulls and lions, scarabs, horse-pulled chariots, fields of grain, spearmen and archers, falcons, maidens with baskets of flowers – in bright and vivid color. By night, as now, the effect is more a honeycomb of dappled gold, softening stark angles and edges.

  It cannot, however, soften the stark angles and edges of two priests, standing like tall herons with their heads bent together in conversation. Gangly of leg and neck and nose, they are brothers, only just beginning to sport the small round bellies of comfortable station.

  “I do not know how much longer we can keep him alive,” says Sennu.

  He is the younger by half a day, and the fact of their unusual birth – one son at the dawning, a second at the zenith – made their long-suffering mother an object of some fame.

  “For so long as Ut-Aten wills it,” Bennu replies.

  Unkind village rumor has it there’d been a sickly third brother born at dusk, and perhaps a midnight fourth, who’d come dead and breathless into the world… or been hastened to that fate… but no one in their family has ever spoken of it, and they have never asked.

  “But if he dies before—”

  “It is in Ut-Aten’s hands. Until then, we tend to him. We protect him.”

  Sennu nods. “When he last woke,” he said, “he called again for her.”

  “If anything in this world will finish him...” mutters Bennu, pinching the patch of skin between his plucked and narrow, gilded brows.

  “What should we do?”

  “What else can we do? Send for her. Bring her. He is still our king.”

  * * *

  “The royal blood,” Khemet began, troubled, when the queen had finished telling him just what her dark and grim business was. “The blood of Pharaoh, the bloodline of the gods...”

  Neferisu shrugged mildly as she peeled the shell from an egg. “Spills as red and readily as the common, as you and I both know.”

  He fell silent again. Thinking – no doubt, as she was – of Mahenef. How sudden it had been, his death. How senseless, even for war.

  The day had been theirs, the battle won, the enemy vanquished and scattered and bleeding on the sands. Khemet himself had been with the prince, the two of them and their drivers, racing side by side in their chariots, chasing down fleeing Hittites. And it had not been a broken axle, a stumbling horse, Mahenef sent flying to break his neck or be trampled… it had not been a final desperate challenge from a still-standing adversary… it had simply been some stray arrow out of nowhere.

  “We will be famous for this,” he’d said, grinning. “Our victory painted in murals, our names chiseled in stone. We will be famous, and I will be Pharaoh, and I will marry Sia and you’ll marry Tanit—”

  “Tanit likes you better.”

  “Then I’ll marry her and you’ll marry Sia; it doesn’t matter to me, they’re already my sisters. What matters is that then you and I shall truly be brothers!”

  One moment, he’d been there, grinning and brandishing his spear, their drivers laughing along with them in great good spirits. The next moment, a bristle of ibis-feather fletching jutted from where Mahenef’s twinkling eye had been. His breath and soul had left his body before it hit the ground.

  Some stray arrow out of nowhere.

  However much Khemet had wanted to believe otherwise – even treacherous murder would have given the chance to punish and avenge! – in the end, that was all it was. A twist of chance, a spiteful whim of the gods. No way of knowing from whose bow it had sprung, friend or foe. No way of knowing anything, or doing anything, except to bear Mahenef to the houses of purification and rest, to be prepared for his journey.

  No way of knowing, no way of doing, nothing to be done.

  Khemet looked at Neferisu, who held his gaze with a calm steadiness few others could. But, then, as she’d said, she remembered him as a child who’d run to her with skinned knees or to beg honeyed dates, as a youth who’d been her son’s constant companion, as a young man who might have married one of her daughters.

  She remembered the Khemet from before, yet she also had need of the Khemet of now.

  What she asked of him… no.

  What she commanded of him.

  “To save Egypt,” he said, more musing aloud than speaking to her.

  “Our history has shown us what happens when madnesses take hold.” Neferisu gestured around with an elegant hand, indicating the salon’s furnishings, the low stool in the likeness of Geb and Nut, a statuette of wing-armed Isis in her regal beauty, the Eye of Horus over the door, a woven hanging depicting Thoth and Ma’at. “They would destroy all of this. The images, names, and symbols of the gods… painted over, chiseled out. Temples torn down. Priests attacked and people punished for their worship.”

  “And, set in place instead, this one and only god.”

  “The sun-disk, the bronze fire, their Ut-Aten.” She paused for a dainty bite of meat and dabbed pomegranate sauce from the corner of her regal mouth. “And of all Ut-Aten’s godly rivals, who would be most hated? Who, already, is more dreaded than even the fearsome Set?”

  Khemet’s lip curved in a wry smile. “Oh, you need not remind me of that truth, I assure you.”

  * * *

  The serpent moves with silent swiftness.

  The serpent waits to strike.

  The serpent sinks its fangs.

  The serpent coils, crushes.

  The serpent strangles, squeezes, kills.

  The serpent steals breath.

  The serpent swallows life.

  Moving, yes, with silent swiftness, silent swiftness through the night. Dark shapes in the darkness, unheard, unseen, undetected. Finding their prey. Waiting to strike, waiting, and then sinking their fangs, coiling, crushing, strangling, squeezing.

  Killing.

  Stealing breath.

  Swallowing life.

  First, the solitary sentries on their lonely watch. The solitary sentries, a
nd anyone else with the misfortune to cross the serpents’ paths.

  Some stonecutters who’ve sneaked from the worker’s camp to share a jug of sour barley-beer… a pair of young lovers fumbling their way through a furtive tryst… a lame old beggar wakening at the wrong moment… a physician’s apprentice selling stolen bone-of-vulture to a merchant’s pregnant wife…

  It is quick. It is quiet. No alarms are raised. Around them, tents and huts and houses dream in slumber.

  They converge, gathering at their appointed meeting-place for the next stage of their attack. Scaled bodies, sinuous and powerful, rippling with muscle. Flinty heads from which slitted eyes peer at one another.

  Six of them.

  There are six.

  When there should be seven.

  * * *

  Khemet slipped from the queen’s salon by way of the same secret rushlit passages through which he’d entered, his presence noticed only by a very few of Neferisu’s most trusted servants.

  Although it had been years since he’d set foot in the palace, his steps neither faltered nor hesitated. How often had he and Mahenef played here as boys? Making up adventures, fighting evil tomb robbers, man-headed scorpions, and other monsters… listening in on mostly-dull discussions between nobles, priests, and scribes…

  He stopped, nerves pricking, pulse quickening, sensing someone else nearby.

  “So, you finally return to us.” A figure emerged from an adjoining doorway, and Khemet stood stunned and blinking for the span of several heartbeats.

  “Sia,” he said, once he could form words.

  “Khemet.”

  “You have… changed.”

  “As have you.”

  He looked her up and down, from the painted toenails of her sandal-clad feet to the jeweled pins holding her intricate black braids in place. His gaze could not help but linger over lithe limbs and firm curves. “I think you have changed… more.”

  A smile crinkled the corners of her eyes, which were outlined in darkest khol and shadowed with the iridescent indigo dust of powdered scarab shells. “What was it that you said to my mother? Ah yes… I was a child then.”

  “No longer.”

  “No longer.”

  Khemet found himself at a loss for words. The girl he remembered, Mahenef’s second sister, had been a reed-thin creature, pretty but shy. This was a woman grown, Bastet incarnate, and however ill-at-ease he’d been in the company of the queen, he felt far more stricken in the company of her daughter.

  Then, her words came through to him, and he looked at her again, more sharply. “You heard our conversation?”

  “Of course I did,” Sia replied, as if he were being foolish. “Tanit and I often played in these passages as well. We knew all the spying-places.”

  “Then you know what the queen commands.”

  Her graceful, bare shoulders lifted in an idle shrug, mirroring her mother’s. “She wants you to go to Sefut-Aten, to stop Pharaoh from this madness.”

  “By any means necessary.”

  “That, indeed, is what she said.”

  “And you know… about me. What I am. What I’ve become.”

  She took a step closer. He both smelled and tasted the sweet fragrances of cosmetics and perfume, and beneath those the even sweeter fragrances all her own.

  “I know that after Mahenef died, you joined the Sons of Apophis. Now you are their leader. A warrior of darkness, a serpent-commander in the army of the night.”

  “We are no army,” he said. “There are no chariots for us, no troops of spearmen and archers. My men are soldiers, but trained in the ways of stealth. Stealth, and murder.”

  Sia nodded.

  “Does that not frighten you? Fill you with abhorrence and disgust?”

  “Should it?” She took another step.

  “Shouldn’t it?”

  In a slow, deliberate movement, she raised a hand and trailed her fingertips along his jawline from earlobe to chin.

  He caught his breath. Warrior of darkness, serpent-commander, Son of Apophis, and her touch made him tremble.

  * * *

  Six where there should be seven.

  One of their number is missing.

  They move – with silent swiftness – past more tents and huts and houses.

  A fat slave-master stumbles yawning into view and pauses to relieve himself against a mudbrick wall. He does not see or hear his death approaching. He only voids his bladder in a wilder and more vigorous spraying stream as breath is strangled from him. They do not let him fall, but lower him carefully behind the wall, covering him with a loose strew of hay.

  Torchlight burns the night. Not solitary sentries but a group of three temple guards, a patrol. Wearing tanned-hide breastplates with yellow sun-disks painted on their chests, carrying round bronze shields, each with a sickle-shaped khopesh sword hanging at his hip. The one who holds the torch is young, barely out of boyhood.

  Six against three, it would be no contest.

  Six against three, in silence?

  The serpent waits to strike.

  In the deepest shadows. Flinty heads lowered, scale-clad bodies powerful and poised.

  The guards walk past the wall behind which the slave-master’s corpse is hidden. Not entirely oblivious; they notice the drying wetness upon the mudbrick, the puddle soaking into the earth. The boy with the torch raises it. They look around. The tallest leans to peer over the wall.

  It must be done.

  A signal is given.

  Now.

  The serpent sinks its fangs.

  Long and thin, sharp and curved.

  Into unprotected backs, piercing linen before penetrating flesh. With unerring accuracy, avoiding ribs and shoulder blades and spine, puncturing the lungs, skewering the heart.

  The younger guard, with the torch, is seized around the neck. His head is jerked violently to the side. The crack must seem loud to him, loud as the end of the world, but it is the only sound that’s made, and to any other ears would be no more than a snapping twig.

  His eyes are wide and still-seeing as he crumples boneless to the ground. Perhaps he watches as the torch is deftly plucked from his hand before it falls into the straw. Perhaps he sees his companions. The taller of them is slumped over the wall, a much thicker flood of wetness running down the mudbrick now to puddle on the earth. The other sprawls facedown, and as the serpent rears up from him, the fangs slide out in twin glistening curves.

  And perhaps he sees, by what had been his own torchlight, the looming scaled shapes around him. The slitted eyes glinting from beneath ridges of flint. Then the torch is rudely snuffed, and whatever the young guard may have seen, he now sees nothing more.

  The men are dead, their breath stolen, their lives swallowed, but this will be much harder to conceal. Time is of the essence, time and speed.

  * * *

  From The Book of Beginnings:

  Then, when the first floodwaters receded, there arose from them a primal mound of rich, red earth. Atop this mound sat a goddess, who soon gave birth to the sun.

  This newborn sun blazed so brightly, he blinded his mother with his brilliance. The goddess, unable to see her child, to find and hold and care for him, began to weep. Her tears fell. Sorrow filled her heart and despair filled her throat.

  Before she choked, she spat out that black bile of despair. She spat it into the vast waters surrounding her mound of earth. And as she did so, it became an immense snake, with a head of ridged flint and a long, scaly body.

  “Why do you weep, oh goddess?” asked the snake.

  “The sun,” she said, “my child, burns too bright to look upon! His brilliance blinds my eyes! What mother would not weep?”

  Meanwhile, the child, who also could not see through his own brightness, cried tears of his own as he wailed for his mother
. His golden tears, when they fell onto the earth, would become the seeds from which men and women sprung.

  “Ah!” said the snake. “If that is what’s the matter, it is easily remedied!”

  So saying, the snake unwound his mighty coils to stretch his length up from the sea. Water sheened and glimmered like oil on his scales. Swift and silent, sinuous, he moved toward the young sun.

  “What are you doing?” asked the goddess, who was of course still blinded.

  But the snake did not answer, for he had gaped wide his jaws, gaped them so wide he closed his mouth around the sun and swallowed him down whole.

  Then, the burning brilliance gone – gone down the snake’s vast dark gullet – the goddess blinked her eyes and found she again could see. When she realized what had happened, she let out an anguished cry.

  “You have devoured my child!”

  “Now you are no longer blind,” said the snake.

  “Give him back to me, you monstrous beast!”

  “This is some gratitude to show me; I shall do no such thing!”

  As it was, however, the sun yet lived, and went on to fight and force his way through the snake’s seething innards – which caused the snake no small amount of discomfort – until he emerged from the other end. Much of his light had been dimmed by the difficult journey, so that his brightness was no longer blinding his mother.

  The goddess was overjoyed to be reunited with her child, but the snake warned her he was far from finished with them.

  “I will swallow him again!”

  “And he will win free again!”

  “I will keep swallowing him!”

  “He will keep winning free!”

  So they said, and so it was, and so has it ever been, and so there are day and night.

  * * *

  While Bennu consults with the physicians, Sennu gathers the folds of his yellow skirt-robe to his bony knees and makes haste up a sloping corridor.

  His sandals slap flat echoes of his footsteps. The walls are tight-fit blocks of stone, covered floor to ceiling with sacred writings from The Scrolls of the Arisen Sun. In alcoves spaced at intervals, bronze sun-disk dishes hold burning candles.