"You believe we are trying to wage senseless war?" The priest's odd, too-clear eyes were fixed on Jack.
All that and a mind reader, too?
"I don't believe anything right now. It's not like you've given us a lot to go on. I want to hear more about the Phrygians."
"You are shrewd. Lord Meleq has chosen well." Kandaulo smiled, content. "I shall tell you what you wish to know. The Phrygians are the Ancient Enemy."
Teal'c and Daniel engaged in a wordless display of synchronized eyebrow-raising.
"They have pursued us here, and they have never stopped decrying us. They disrupt our devotions. We can no longer worship as we ought to, and Meleq punishes us. They claim he delights in punishment, and they continue to raid our cities and murder our priests. One of those killed in the stern of the ship was Abibaal, my friend, our High Priest. Worst of all, they steal our children. Meleq's children."
"The children who were abducted from the ship?" prompted Daniel.
"Those and others."
Those and others.
"How many?" asked Jack. As if the exact number mattered. He knew for a fact it didn't. He was an authority on that one.
The third-degree reverend was still staring at his quarry, feigning omniscience. His eyes were quicksilver gray, with pupils like pinpricks. At least they didn't glow. "Forty-three in all."
For a moment the yard fell quiet enough to hear the petals flutter as a ribbon of wind sighed past the pillars. Then Carter stirred softly and blew out a little puff of breath.
"Are they... Do you have any indication that the children are still alive?"
The see-all eyes slid away from Jack at last and on to Carter. "You do not want to exact revenge on our behalf, Lady Samantha? You are as wise as you are beautiful. I shall not deceive you. We cannot say, other than that the children were alive when they were taken. But Meleq has sent you to us. He has sent his spirit with you. It must be his wish that you help us free our children. If they are still alive."
If they are still children.
Teal'c hid a wince, a wisp of cold sadness flickering over his face. Jack could guess where he was right now. A dungeon on Chulak, crying kids and pleading parents, as Apophis and his entourage were taking their pick of the hosts.
Kill the rest!
The Priest of the Third Order gazed at him again, scared of the wrath of his god, imagined or real, and suddenly Jack got sick of the mind games, his own and Kandaulo's. The facts were inescapable. They'd all seen them. Except, he was the last person who should be trusted with this decision. He'd have to make it anyway and hope to God that he didn't make it simply for the memory of a dead child.
"Do you have any hunch at all of where the Phrygians are hiding?"
"So you will aid us?" Kandaulo asked back.
Jack nodded, oddly relieved to watch a minute Mexican wave of corresponding nods ripple from Carter to Teal'c to Daniel. For once even Kelly looked like she might be in agreement... perhaps it was constipation.
"You have my thanks and the thanks of our people." Kandaulo rose from his bench. "Tomorrow you shall meet the Synod and confer. But tonight we shall prove that no man can prevent us from rightful worship, and we shall beg Lord Meleq's blessing for our endeavor."
By foresight or choreography he turned precisely in time to face Luli who had emerged from the house. Dressed in white robes and a thin diadem similar to Kandaulo's, the boy crossed the yard with a studied poise that seemed jarringly wrong, a million miles away from the kid who'd been chasing through the patio to greet his father. When Ayzebel saw him, she leaped up as though her chair had caught fire, eyes huge, one hand clamped over her mouth, trying to hold in her soul or her sanity.
Then the hand dropped, slapped aside by a wail. "No!"
Like Sara nine years ago. But Luli wasn't dead, was he?
Luli continued his private little parade, refusing to meet his mother's eyes. "You shame me, mother. You shame this family."
She shrank into herself and without another word fled down the arcade. For a second it seemed as though Hamilgart wanted to go after her, but one of Kandaulo's crystal gazes nailed him to the spot.
"The Lady Ayzebel is distressed," the reverend announced, stating the obvious. "That is understandable, and Lord Meleq will value her sacrifice all the more. In time she will come to recognize the great honor bestowed upon your house."
"Mind telling me what's going on?"
It'd been way too loud, with way too much of an edge, but the carillon was jingling like Christmas morning, and Jack was on his feet, not quite sure how he'd got there. A strained smile on their host's face, glove puppet scrunched into a fist kind of smile, and Hamilgart was about to answer when Luli glided to a halt in front of them, his smile even more surreal, somewhere between Happy- Clappy and brainwashed.
"I have been chosen, Jack. Meleq has chosen me to serve him."
"Who says, Luli?"
"Kandaulo and father. It is a great honor."
Kids crying and parents pleading. But Luli wasn't crying, was he?
Ignoring the twinge in his knee, Jack crouched to be at eye-level with the kid. "What does that mean? Chosen?"
"I shall serve Meleq."
Yeah, he'd grasped that. Circular arguments. Gotta love `em.
"Luli, if it's such an honor, why's your mom so upset?"
At last the boy dropped the act and his small face creased with a mixture of sly guilt and sulkiness normal for his age. Like he knew he'd been shooting his mouth off and hurt mom.
"Mother does not like it because I am her only child. That makes me the firstborn, and that is why I have been chosen." He pouted a little. "She should be proud of me."
Hamilgart woke from his rigor, still smiling, stepped forward, and placed a hand on Luli's shoulder. "She will be, my son. She will be pleased when Lord Meleq is pleased with us once more."
Countless torches illuminated the stone path from the city to the temple. You could see them snake up the hill, twinkle from between trees, flickering and alive like some mythical dragon's tail. The Tyreans had turned out in force, both sexes, all ages, carrying those torches and lining two miles of road either side. Their utter stillness made the spectacle even more unreal. No chants, no drums, no ritual noise of any kind, just bowed heads and oddly elated silence. It was quiet enough to hear the swishing of surf on rocks far below, air streaming through a night bird's wings, the hoarse twitter of cicadas - even the rustle of Ayzebel's cloak as she shivered. She'd led them to the spot by the cliff where the forest ended and stood waiting.
"They shall arrive soon," she murmured, her voice hollow with a desolation that made Sam's stomach clench.
Arms folded in front of his chest, the Colonel leaned against the trunk of a cedar a few steps away from the rest of his team, inhabiting his own thoughts. He'd made the right call, Sam firmly believed that. So did Daniel and Teal'c. You couldn't witness a ship unload a massacre and ignore it. But he'd been unusually tentative to make a decision. She figured she knew why. This whole situation was too close to the nerve; to wit, his reticence.
I lost my son!
It had been one of the very few occasions when he'd actually mentioned it - a desperate last-ditch effort to dissuade Malachi from time-looping them into the Hereafter - and the look on his face hadn't been something you'd easily forget. As a matter of fact, Sam Carter was perfectly content never to see that much raw pain again, which stopped her from even trying to bring it up now. Not that he'd let her, anyway.
"Hey, Carter! Something's happening," he whispered.
Major Carter stifled a little gasp of surprise, hoped to hell he hadn't noticed her staring at him for the past two minutes, and squinted down the path in the direction he was pointing.
The dragon was losing its tail. Right at the bottom of the cliff, where the road entered the city, torches winked out, snuffed one after the other, parallel lines of nothing crawling up the hill and eating the brightness. Just ahead of them she could make out the proces
sion. Moving dots of brilliant white, tinted golden by torchlight - the children, twelve of them, Hamilqart had said. Behind billowed the dark purple of priests and acolytes. They moved at a slow, ceremonial pace, and once the last of the acolytes had passed, the onlookers by the roadside would extinguish their torches.
"Tsk! Look at it!" The ever-present Gladstone bag had yielded a collapsible hunting stool, one of those gizmos with a spike at one end and a seat that unfolded like leaves on the other. Balancing on this idiotic contraption sat the Professor, furiously scribbling in her notebook. "Matham's ominous Passing Through the Fire... It's a blooming pageant, Jackson!"
Daniel shushed her, and Sam wondered about the unfortunate Matham. Teal'c peeked over Kelly's shoulder at the notebook, cocked an eyebrow, and returned his attention to the road.
They were drawing closer now. The children walked in pairs, side by side, stacked like organ pipes, shortest to tallest. The little ones in front could hardly be older than six. Tiny white robes, heads held high, their faces much too serious, as though the responsibility for an entire people had been dropped on their narrow shoulders. In a way it had, though, or at least that's what they'd been told. Sam grimaced. They should be climbing trees or batting balls through living room windows.
"We do it, too," muttered Daniel. "Think of the Dalai Lama. Same thing in the Middle Ages. Little kids, sometimes as young as three or four, were sent into monasteries and convents. They were called oblates, gifts to God. Their parents never saw them again."
Great. She resisted an impulse to glance at the Colonel.
Between them, Daniel and Kelly had managed to extract enough information to form at least a rough idea of what was going on. The children, all firstborns, would spend a night of fasting and prayer and be initiated to the cult of Meleq at dawn. It explained the monks' cells that Daniel had found.
As to what happened after the initiation, accounts got a bit hazy. Hamilgart had grown misty-eyed and cited the `Ineffable Mysteries of Meleq', as though that shed any light on the matter. They would grow up in the care of the Lord Meleq, he'd said, as had hundreds of others before them, until the Phrygians had begun to interfere. Supposedly Meleq had been displeased and sent floods, storms, and diseases. So Abibaal, the late High Priest, and two acolytes had secretly sailed to Sidonia to pick up children there, bring them back, and hold some kind of mass initiation to appease Meleq. The outcome of that plan had docked in the harbor this afternoon.
Right now they were watching Plan B, as drummed up by the Synod under the new leadership of Kandaulo. Plan B was Forge Ahead Regardless, based on the assumption that the Phrygians would be unable to stage another raid so soon.
Over night sounds and the whisper of flames drifted the rasp of leather soles on stone. Ayzebel shifted again, fingers clenched in the lush fabric of her cloak, knuckles stress-white against violet. The first children were passing. One of the two munchkins out front wore his bottom lip clamped between his teeth, wet streaks glistening on his cheeks, a matching smear soiling the sleeve of his robe. At a guess, his parents had been further down the hill. How on earth was the little tyke supposed to stay up the entire night? Fasting and prayer. The kid was five, if he was a day.
Sam looked away, looked for Luli.
He was the right half of the fourth pair, next to a chubby boy with red hair and freckles who seemed out of breath. When he spotted his mother, the put-on dignity sprang hairline cracks. He missed a step and his eyes went wide, dark and pleading, as if to say Can we go home now, mom? Then he blinked, stuck out his chin like something that had escaped from a second-rate production of Annie, and marched on.
Ayzebel hadn't moved. No shiver, no rustle. Body taut as a string, her face bled of color, she stared through the procession. Still waiting, as though she hadn't even seen her son, and perhaps she really hadn't. Her pupils were unfocused, gazing at something miles and years away. Still waiting. Maybe for her husband.
The children filed past, and after them followed two young men carrying brass bowls with incense. Fanned by motion, white smoke coiled in the breeze and unfurled over the crowd, spreading a moldy sweet blanket of scent. Wisps of it reached for the nine members of the Synod; an assortment of old men, sharp as hawks, the veil of piety thin as the smoke from the braziers. Rulers first, priests second. Ahead of them strode Kandaulo, the new High Priest. He seemed relieved and tense at the same time, smiling and X-rayeyeing the bystanders as though he expected trouble and Phrygian caps. The pale gray eyes settled on her and the smile deepened. Incongruously, Sam found herself wanting to believe its sincerity. Then Kandaulo had passed, too.
Behind him and the Synod, like the train on a wedding dress, trailed a symphony of mauve and lavender; the acolytes, among them Hamilgart, beaming proudly, not quite craning his neck but straining to catch his wife's eye. Ayzebel concealed her face, and the beam collapsed.
As the last purple back moved on up the road, torches were stubbed upside down in the dirt and night fell.
"Do you mind?" barked Kelly, having lost her desk lamp.
Sam heard a brief snort that must have come from Daniel. Around them rose the noises of people beginning to depart, soft calls of farewell, feet shuffling towards the road and the city. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw Ayzebel stray to the edge of the cliff, gazing out over a starlit coast and calm, inky sea. Teal'c had noticed as well and joined her, murmuring something too quiet to be heard. After a moment she faced him.
"We shall return to the house," she said.
"Absolutely not!" retorted a rotund shadow in clipped British accents. "I must see what is happening at the temple!"
"It is not permitted." Ayzebel's gentle voice again. "Only the postulants and the priests have access to the temple at this time."
"But you don't understand! I have to record -"
"That's not how it works, Professor," Daniel interrupted the looming tirade. "We're going back to the house. You can ask Hamilgart in the morning."
"Or look it up on the Internet, maybe?" The creak of rusty hinges and irritation announced that Kelly was folding her hunting stool. Under protest. "No wonder your head is stuffed with silly ideas, Jackson! How can you people expect to learn anything if you never bother to gain first-hand experience? Alright, alright! Give me that, duckie! I'm going!"
Amen to that.
Kelly hefted the Gladstone bag and set off down the road, Daniel trotting after her. Teal'c and Ayzebel were a few steps ahead of them, Teal'c's head just visible above an amorphous mass of people. A hand lightly touched Sam's shoulder, making her start.
"I thought Miss Marple would take root," murmured Colonel O'Neill. "Listen, Carter. If anyone should ask, I'm taking a walk."
Crap. "You're planning to check out the temple, sir?"
"You never know. I might end up there."
"Is that wise?"
"Probably not. I'd look it up on the Internet but there's no modem in my bathtub." A quick white gleam in the darkness told her he was grinning. It disappeared abruptly. "I need to find out, Carter. Something feels funny."
And that was that. Arguing with the Colonel's funny feelings didn't pay.
"You want backup, sir?"
"No. Just make sure Miss Marple doesn't catch on. If she realizes that I didn't invite her along, it'll cost me my manhood."
Sam chuckled. "I'll keep her busy."
"See you back at the house in..." He turned to let his watch catch the starlight. "Two hours."
"Sir? What if -"
"I can take care of myself. I'm good at this, Carter."
Before she could say anything else he'd slipped among the trees and vanished.
iobhan Kelly rose on tiptoe, peered over several shoulders, and spied the shaven head bob at a reassuring distance above a great many hirsute ones. Then again, distance didn't mean much because that alien lad had eyes in the back of his polished pate. She sidestepped one of the Tyrean aubergines, bent over, and pretended to tie her shoelaces. Young Jackson, slalomin
g through an entire clan of natives, failed to notice. Excellent. Without straightening up, she ducked off the road, and hid behind a tree trunk. The multitudes kept oozing past. Dim starlight picked out a shock of blond hair; the girl drifted by, looking preoccupied. Three bothers down, one to go. But that meddlesome pocket-edition of Attila the Hun was nowhere in sight. Where the dickens had he got to?
The steady stream of humanity - alienity, rather - gradually thinned to a trickle of stragglers. She must have missed him. So much the better. Bag in one hand, Kelly clutched the branches of a bush with the other and hauled herself up the embankment. A few dozen yards into the forest she came upon a narrow trail. Dear Mama had gone to her grave still harbouring a firm belief in the constitutional benefits of the carrot, and perhaps the heaps of daucus carota shovelled into little Siobhan from an early age had produced some effect other than diarrhoea and an abiding dislike of all things orange. Despite her age, Kelly's night vision was perfectly in order. Good enough to see that the trail ran uphill in approximately the right direction and to follow it.
As the patter of feet and the murmur of conversations faded, nightlife in the forest took over. Owls hooted and small mammals - or possibly marsupials - skittered through the undergrowth. Their activities invited the question whether there were large mammals or marsupials and, if so, whether they had fangs. She set down the Gladstone bag, opened it, and groped for her hunting stool. The leaves that unfolded to create the seat had elongated holes for better grip. In other words, the stool could double as a walking stick and weapon. Chances were she wouldn't kill anything with it, but a hefty smack with the steel-tipped end was guaranteed to make those man-eating platypuses think twice.
Platypuses or platypi? Perhaps platypus, with a long V. Ought to ask Jackson in the morning.
The thought elicited a giggle, astonishingly loud in the quiet of the forest, and this in turn called to mind some patently absurd advice on how, when travelling on foot in the wild, one should generate a maximum amount of noise so as to frighten away predators. Absurd or not, the Professor felt sure that no self-respecting predator would be frightened by a giggle. The situation required harsher measures. Taking a deep breath she launched into a full-throated rendition of Good King Wenceslas. Not quite seasonal, of course, but it was the only song she could remember off the top of her head.
Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 Page 5
