The Age of Ra

by James Lovegrove

  That was his cue. That was a come-on line if ever David had heard one. And all at once he was reminded, acutely, how good Zafirah looked. Even with her features hemmed in by the turban and seamed with road grime, she was nothing less than striking. And the way she straddled the bike - arms folded, legs straight out in an inverted V, holding the machine upright with the clench of her thighs - was impossibly sexy. He felt a bead of sweat trickling down his torso under his shirt, working its way from collarbone to crotch.

  He could reach out to her now. Should. Must. This was it. Now or never.

  But then Steven's admonition flashed through his head: Zafirah isn't for you. He could see the words in his mind's eye, as though they were written in letters of fire ten feet tall. They formed a barricade in his thoughts. He couldn't seem to push past them. Steven had put Zafirah off-limits, had made her forbidden territory for him. The two of them could still work together, that was acceptable to him, but nothing more. And somehow David couldn't help but comply with his brother's wishes.

  Why? he asked himself as his arms remained limp by his sides and the bead of sweat was absorbed untraceably into his waistband. Why am I letting Steven dictate what I can and can't do regarding this woman?

  Zafirah was watching him, waiting for him to make his move.

  David felt abject. Helpless.

  Seconds passed.

  Zafirah turned her face away. Something in the middle distance caught her attention.

  ''There,'' she said coolly. ''Look. A car in trouble.''

  A dinky little runabout had strayed off the hard-packed dirt track the column was following. It had driven onto the soft sand at the edges. It had become bogged down.

  Zafirah lowered her goggles and stamped down on the kick-starter. David did the same. He rode after her towards the stricken car, steering his bike along the snaky double-groove her tyres left behind.

  The car had to be unloaded. They dug the wheels out. It still couldn't free itself. They used planks so that it could gain traction. Finally, revving hard, the car lurched clear.

  An hour's work in the blazing sunshine, David and Zafirah barely exchanging a word.

  And that was how it remained with them for the rest of that day and into the next, all the way to Suez. Awkward. Strained. The air between them heavy with silence and disappointment.

  Then came the Nephthysian attack. Not the naval bombardment David had predicted. Something much more insidious.

  20. Mummies

  The process of recycling dead troops in mass quantities had become quite industrialised. There was something of the production line about it.

  First, freshly killed corpses were gathered from the battlefield and transported to a Reanimation Facility, usually to be found at a military base as part of its extensive temple complex. In the Reanimation Facility, a pyramidal building naturally, the bodies were sorted into two categories, the relatively intact and the unusable. The latter were discarded; incinerated. The former were cleansed and purified with oils, then sliced open so that certain major organs - liver, lungs, stomach, intestine - could be excised and removed. Each crop of viscera was sealed in a set of Canopic jars, the military-issue version of which was a cubic canister with four separate compartments, designed for compactness and utility.

  The corpses' brains were extracted next, scraped out through the nose with hooks and destroyed. Not only was this customary, as the Ancient Egyptians had always believed that the purpose of the brain was nothing more than to provide lubrication for the sinuses, but the last thing unliving shock troops needed was the potential capacity for autonomous thought.

  Up until the middle of the twentieth century, natron had been used to dry the bodies out. They were covered with the substance, a kind of salt mixture, and left for forty days while it did its work. Natron, however, was expensive to procure, as well as slow acting, so a cheaper, faster method had been devised. The bodies were hung on racks and rolled into an enormous kiln, to be fired like wet clay. Once they were desiccated, entirely without moisture, they were allowed to cool and then wrapped from head to foot in cerecloths, with an extra layer of plain linen bandage forming a tight, tidy outer casing.

  The entire process took less than twenty-four hours, and could be performed by trainee acolytes or even workers drawn from the laity. For the final stage, however, a fully-fledged priest was required.

  The priest prayed over the withered bodies, chanted, made animal sacrifices, invoking divine power, summoning down ba to instil life in these husks, to make them capable of standing up, walking, even wielding mêlÈe weaponry. The Canopic jars, and the associated innards they contained, were ba-infused at the same time.

  Mummies could be kept in storage till needed. Then, as many as were required could be activated and sent into the field. The mummies would do their masters' bidding as long as they remained within reasonably close range of the Canopic jars, at a distance of no greater than five miles. Outside that radius they ground to a halt and became lifeless, insensible things again - true corpses - and could not be resurrected a second time.

  To intercept the Lightbringer as he neared Suez, the Nephthysians deployed an entire regiment of mummies, approximately 600 undead ''units''. The intention was to sow fear and discord, and rout the Freegyptian desecrator-terrorists. The Nephthysians wished to demonstrate to the infidels what happened when you opposed those with a god on their side.

  Advance scouts came back to the Lightbringer with the news. The western outskirts of Suez teemed with mummies. There were throngs of them around the town's petrochemical refineries and concrete and fertiliser plants. There were more in the desert itself. They were just standing there in rough formation, clutching the Nephthysian choice of close-combat weapon, the short sword. They were completely still, like statues. It was eerie - hundreds of bandage-swathed figures stationed out in the hot sun, waiting. Just waiting.

  ''The Nephs are trying to spook us,'' said the Lightbringer. ''They think that that many mummies will scare us off. We won't dare advance. Me personally, though, I'm insulted. They're sending the undead to take care of us? That's how seriously they take us, that they won't even commit living troops? If it wasn't for this mask, I'd spit on the ground.''

  Troops were marshalled. Weapons were readied for an assault.

  Meanwhile, David was despatched with Zafirah and several of her Liberators on a subsidiary mission.

  Simple triangulation determined the likeliest location for the Canopic jars. Given the maximum five-mile range and the sheer number of mummies involved, the jars had to be on a ship, a largish one, close to shore, somewhere inside the curve of the Bay of Suez.

  Sure enough, a freighter flying the Nephthysian colours lay at anchor at Port Tawfiq, a spit of land jutting out into the confluence of the canal and the Red Sea. Through binoculars David spied three priests on deck, taking the late-afternoon air. That clinched it. Battleships invariably carried a priest, sometimes two. But a merchant navy vessel? The Canopic jars were on board. The freighter was the hub of the Nephs' mummy operation.

  Darkness fell. David, Zafirah and the Liberators approached along the shoreline, keeping low. The freighter loomed before them, her bulk haloed by the dockyard floodlights. She was manned - perhaps fittingly, given her cargo - by a skeleton crew. The watch at the base of the gangplank consisted of just a pair of junior ratings, who were more interested in the Pan-African Tournament football match they were listening to on a transistor radio than in the possibility of a sneak attack on their vessel. Two of the Liberators, the twin-like cousins Saeed and Salim, stole up behind them and briskly and efficiently slit their throats. The watch on deck were no more vigilant, and no more difficult to catch unawares, and then just no more.

  Nephthysian overconfidence. They really had not got the full measure of the Lightbringer yet.

  On the bridge the chief officer was keeping a sleepy eye on things. David put a gun to his head and demanded to be taken below. The man spoke excellent English. He begged
not to be killed. He had a wife and six daughters back home in Dar es Salaam.

  ''Six?'' David said.

  ''Too many,'' said the chief officer, with feeling. ''I am overjoyed to see them when I am on leave, but within a week I am always overjoyed at the prospect of returning to sea.''

  ''Think about them, then, and everything will be OK.''

  The chief officer promised he would keep his family uppermost in his mind and do whatever David asked.

  Belowdecks, he led David and the others along a catwalk that ran almost the entire 500-foot length of the freighter's hull. Beneath their feet lay a couple of dozen open-topped holds, laid out in a grid pattern, each large enough to accommodate perhaps twenty of the undead creatures stacked upright. Overhead ran a system of pulleys and winches for hauling the mummies up onto a cargo elevator. All of the holds were empty.

  A sound of singing grew louder, drifting through the cavernous space from a doorway at the far end of the catwalk. A trio of male voices were entwined in liturgical harmony, intoning praise for Nephthys, Queen of the Hot Lands, Consort of Set, Guardian-Goddess With the Wings of a Kite. David took a quick glance at his watch. Past 10pm. Spot-on timing. The Lightbringer's forces would have just begun engaging with the mummies. Steven wanted to give his troops a taste of combat. He wanted them blooded. He also wanted them to learn that mummies, strong as they were, loathsome as they were, were not as indomitable as their reputation suggested. Much of their effectiveness came from the natural revulsion people felt towards them. If that could be overcome, then what was left was a bunch of stiffly moving, somewhat clumsy opponents who responded slowly to commands and could be neutralised by the simple expedient of blowing their legs off. The ship's priests were aware that battle had begun. They were beseeching Nephthys to grant a favourable outcome.

  They broke off from their song as David entered with the chief officer, followed by Zafirah and the two cousins. The holy men were startled, then outraged. They launched into a tirade of protest, and one didn't need Arabic to know what they were saying. We were in the middle of conducting a religious rite. How dare you people come barging in like that? This is blasphemy! Sacrilege!

  Zafirah waved a gun at them. That shut them up. In the space of a second the priests went from barking hounds to whipped curs. They seemed to deflate within their robes.

  ''Not so keen to visit Iaru just yet, eh?'' she jeered. ''Doesn't surprise me. Life - this life - is good for a priest. Wealth, respect, status, why give it up?''

  Other than a small altar with votive candles on it, there was nothing in the room but brushed-steel canisters, the sets of Canopic jars. They were piled neatly on shelves like tinned goods in a store cupboard, each stamped with the date of excision and a serial number. David fancied he could detect a faint whiff of rotting flesh in the air, but that was doubtless his imagination.

  While Saeed and Salim got busy laying charges, the priests and the chief officer were shepherded towards the ship's living quarters and locked in the wardroom. David, Zafirah, and the Liberators then set about rounding up every other crewmember they could find, including the captain who was fast asleep in his cabin. By 10.45pm everything was ready. The crew and priests were escorted down the gangplank. To the west the night sky was lit up by flashes. Distant detonations rumbled and pealed. The Lightbringer's army, laying into the mummies. David could picture the looks of growing delight on the Freegyptians' faces as they scythed through the ranks of the undead, realising that it wasn't so hard to destroy these monsters, especially if you could get over thinking of them as things that had formerly been human. It helped that none of the mummies was likely to have been a Freegyptian once. As David knew, mummies were that much more difficult to deal with when there was every chance that some of them used to be your own allies, your own countrymen, perhaps even close comrades.

  Saeed - or it could have been Salim - handed David the remote detonator. He passed it on to Zafirah.

  ''You do the honours,'' he said.

  ''A gift,'' she replied sardonically. ''How kind.''

  He didn't want her to look at him like that, so bruised, so resentful. He hated how her eyes became narrow, dimming their usual gemlike lustre. But what could he do? He kept wrestling with his conscience. He kept trying to overcome his need to please his brother by abiding by the taboo Steven had imposed on her. He kept losing.

  Zafirah raised the detonator and, with an emphatic set of her jaw, pressed the button.

  The explosion was muffled, like someone slamming a heavy door in a room downstairs, but the whole freighter jolted with the force of it. She rocked as though some vital organ had gone into spasm. Deep ripples eddied out from her hull. A short while later smoke appeared, seeping out from under her cargo hatches.

  At much the same time the sounds of far-off combat waned. The flashes and rumbles grew further apart, then ceased.

  One of the priests fixed David with a glare and began muttering.

  ''What's he saying?'' David asked Zafirah.

  ''Oh, just cursing you. Summoning the wrath of Nephthys down on your head. Calling you a heathen and a godless monkey and a follower of a false prophet.''

  Had David been in a better, more even-tempered frame of mine just then, he might have shrugged it off. In the event, fury welled up. He saw himself reaching for the priest, grabbing him by the robes, knocking him to the ground, kicking him in the face as he lay there. He saw himself, and then realised he was actually doing all this. It was as though he was not the author of his own actions, he was a bystander, someone else was responsible.

  He stopped then, when the truth dawned. Leaving the priest moaning and spitting out blood and teeth, he turned on his heel and strode off in a cloud of self-disgust.

  At the site of the battle, jubilation reigned. Half the mummies had been felled by gunfire and grenade. The rest had collapsed abruptly, turning to heaps of bandage and powdered flesh the moment the Canopic jars had been destroyed.

  ''The Nephthysians thought us cowards and fools,'' the Lightbringer told his troops, who hadn't suffered a single casualty. ''They treated us with contempt. They thought all it would take to make us turn back was a few mummies. How severely they underestimated us! How wrong they were!''

  The cavalcade of vehicles traversed the canal without further interruption, passing onto the Sinai Peninsula, the immense triangular tract of land that would take them to the eastern border of Arabia. David, in the back seat of the Lightbringer's car, closed his eyes and did something he hadn't done in weeks: he prayed.

  He called on Osiris and Isis. He asked them to hear him. He begged for their understanding. He was looking out for his brother, that was all he was doing. He had allowed himself to become swept up in the Lightbringer's crusade but it was Steven he was helping. He wasn't a heathen. He was not. He was still a true son of the Parent Hegemony. He still had faith.

  Didn't he?

  For the first time in his life David felt no certainty that the Benevolent Father and the Mother of All were listening. His prayer seemed to go nowhere, sounding hollow in his head, dull and echoless. He wondered if that was the fate of all the prayers he had ever prayed. He couldn't recall a time when any of the wishes he had articulated in them had actually been granted. He'd prayed mainly because praying had made him feel better.

  It didn't now. Quite the opposite.

  He opened his eyes.

  Heathen.

  How had that happened? When? At what moment had his faith deserted him?

  In the desert. When he was lost. When he had been close to death and all too acutely aware of the gods' indifference, not to mention that of his military superiors, who had thought it preferable to kill him and his men rather than leave them the possibility of escaping and surviving. When he had never felt quite so abandoned and alone.

  It wasn't that he no longer believed the One True Pantheon existed. Of course it did.

  He no longer believed in the Pantheon. He no longer trusted the gods, any of them, to do
what was right by their worshippers.

  So damn them.

  Heathen he was, then.

  And as such, he would stick with the Lightbringer - with Steven - to the bitter end.

  21. Anubians

  At dawn, not far from the border, David found Steven atop a low ridge, facing east. Behind them the encampment was coming to life, the Lightbringer's army getting ready for the push into Arabia. Ahead, the desert was lit in shades of virgin pink and baby blue. The camp was filled with clatter and bustle as meals were eaten and tents put away, but from the landscape ahead came a tremendous, primordial silence that seemed to sweep all before it, the engulfing soundlessness that must have existed at the world's beginning and would be all that remained at its end.

  Steven, hearing the crunch of footfalls, twitched his head. He had been lost in contemplation of the sunrise. He turned.

  ''Dave,'' he said. ''Glad it's you. Don't feel up to talking to anyone else just at this moment.''

  ''What's the matter?'' David asked.

  ''Nothing,'' his brother said. He rubbed a hand back and forth over the top of his mask, as though trying to carve the white sphere of his head even smoother. ''Nothing. Just... vertigo, that's all.''

  David glanced around. The ridge they were standing on was a bump in the earth, barely twenty feet high. ''This is hardly Everest.''

  ''Not actual vertigo, dimwit. Metaphorical. We're about to take an immense step. A step over a precipice, it feels like.''

  ''Doubt? You?''

  ''Not so much doubt. A sense of... I'd say destiny, except you'd laugh.''

  ''I would, too.''

  ''This is it, Dave. Today we make the move that'll bring the full wrath of the Nephs down on our heads. The Setics probably as well. Once we cross the Arabian border there's no going back. We go from nuisance to threat. We'll no longer be something the Nephs try to brush off, we'll be something they're duty-bound to crush.''