Daniel?
"Jack!"
He jerked awake, nearly rolled into the basin, and steadied himself with the wrong hand, up to his armpit in water. At least it chased away the remnants of his dream. If it had been a dream. Teal'c and Sam stared at him, mystified, and the noise from the street had stopped completely.
"Daniel Jackson?"
"Daniel?"
"What happened to Jack?" he croaked.
"I told you half an hour ago." Sam frowned. "The Colonel went up to the temple."
"That's not what I mean! While I was... gone!" His fingers fluttered in lieu of a more accurate description, sprinkling drops of water on the floor. "While I was gone. Something happened to Jack while I was gone."
Oh here we go again! That goddamn exchange of furtive looks. Dr. Jackson, this briefing is classified. Screw this!
"You were dreaming. Daniel, you're probably -"
"Don't give me that, Sam!"
"Daniel Jackson, we "
At which point the front door crashed open. Daniel half expected the Conga to make an entrance and felt an uncharacteristic desire to shoot the lot of them. Except, it wasn't the revelers. It was a group of twelve men, led by Kandaulo and Hamilgart, and they weren't dancing. Most of them had minor injuries, all of them were dirty, and six of them wore armor and swords. Guards of some sort, and burly ones at that. Sam had leaped to her feet.
"Hamilgart?"
Their host squirmed, and Kandaulo pushed him aside. "Apprehend them!"
The guards took two or three steps and froze in their tracks as Teal'c made a meal of rising to his full height. Psychological warfare personified. How did you arrest a spirit if you actually believed in such things?
"Them!" Kandaulo pointed at Sam and Daniel.
The guards dithered, glanced at Teal'c.
"What is the meaning of this?" the spirit enquired politely.
Evidently this was the night for abortive explanations. Before anyone had a chance to reply, Hamilqart's wife came rushing along the arcade, trailed by a bevy of servants, some carrying torches.
"Husband!"
"I am well," the master of the house reassured her, a little wistful, as though he had preferred to return covered in heroic wounds.
"I am glad to see you unharmed." Almost the same words she had used the previous day, but now they seemed formulaic, and she looked relieved for all the wrong reasons.
Teal'c fixed the largest of the beefcakes with a glare he could only have picked up from Apophis. "You! Speak!"
The man shuddered and a glow of eager dread spread over grime-smudged features. Then he sank to his knees. "The temple was attacked, Lord Spirit. Your friend and the old woman were among the Phrygians."
"I do not believe you."
His face mere inches from the floor, the hapless guard shivered again. "It is the truth, Lord, I swear."
"I saw them." Gingerly, Hamilgart stepped forward. "They did come running toward the gate ahead of the other attackers. But I admit it is possible that they -"
"You locked them out!" Ashen-faced, Sam voiced what none of them wanted to admit. "Was there any particular reason or were you just scared to kill them yourselves?"
It sparked a murmur of outrage among the men, and Hamilgart winced. Daniel supposed he should step in and smooth over the friction. He couldn't bring himself to do it. Passivity by choice this time, not by higher obligation, and for once it felt right. If he closed his eyes he saw the same images Sam must be seeing - charred, blackened bodies. The memory of that stench seemed terribly real, and Jack had not responded to Sam's radio call.
"Woman! Do not speak out of turn! And do not accuse us of cowardice when it is your friends who acted cowardly," spat Kandaulo. "They fled with the Phrygians. Once they had captured our children."
"O'Neill would do no such thing." The Lord Spirit stared down the priest. "We wish to view the temple precinct."
"Meleq protect us!"
The guard carrying the torch flinched at the sudden glare of the flashlight.
Teal'c had not required it earlier. His eyesight was sharp enough to discern where a multitude of footprints veered off the stone path. As the Tauri were fond of saying, a blind man could have seen it. Now the broad white beam of Major Carter's flashlight picked out the smooth imprints of numerous sandals that had flattened plants and soil and overlaid any earlier trace. He could not say with certainty whether O'Neill had come this way.
He followed the trail regardless, motioning Major Carter to accompany him. His perseverance was rewarded. Some twenty paces further into the trees, he discovered a puddle surrounded by muddy ground. Most of the sandal-wearers seemed to have evaded it, and at the far end he found the profile of a combat boot.
"Looks like the Colonel's," Major Carter stated.
"Indeed. And it appears that a great many others were in pursuit of him."
"Thanks, Teal'c. Keep those positive thoughts coming, why don't you?"
"As yet we know nothing of the pursuers' intentions."
"Sure. They were trying to sell Girl Scout cookies." The beam of light scanned the ground as she moved further along the tracks. "It's probably why the Colonel shot this guy. He wasn't in the mood for cookies."
This response took Teal'c by surprise. It had been worthy of O'Neill. But like O'Neill, she used flippancy to conceal her anxiety from herself and from others.
Major Carter was pointing the flashlight at a waxen face. The eyes stared wide open, etched with an expression of rage and surprise. Almost exactly between them gaped the entry wound, its size consistent with a 9 mm round. Even without this additional confirmation he would have been certain. The Tyreans did not possess firearms. The Jaffa peered past gloomy tree boles and at the ghostly shapes of men who lingered on the path, whipped by the rain and the biting wind that had risen.
"Priest! You requested proof that O'Neill was not aiding the attackers," he called out. "You may wish to view this."
A tall, white-haired figure emerged from the group and cautiously glided into the forest. A pair of guards escorted him, lighting the way. It was true that Kandaulo had demanded proof, but he would not relish seeing it. Men such as he resented having their assumptions overthrown by fact. Conceivably this and the humiliation that went with it would heighten the priest's hostility.
When he arrived, he regarded the corpse with disdain. "Is this your proof? You have seen what the Phrygians do. They are animals. His fellow bandits could have killed him."
"They could not." Teal'c permitted himself a minute smile. It was as he had foreseen. "Which of their weapons would cause a wound such as this? Turn him around."
The guards obeyed and recoiled when they beheld what the Jaffa already knew to be there. The back of the dead man's skull was missing, disclosing a mess of blood and brain matter. At last Kandaulo's scorn gave way to uncertainty.
"What did this?" he rasped.
"A small piece of metal ejected at high speed from the weapon O'Neill used."
"But this cannot be! You are -"
"Dammit!"
While they were debating, Major Carter had continued to search the area. Clearly with some success, although she did not appear to welcome the results. Retrieving an object from beneath a patch of fern some ten meters to the right, she straightened up abruptly.
"Want me to demonstrate, Kandaulo?"
An instant later, the nature of her discovery became obvious. She fired, and the bullet tore into a tree trunk behind the priest, provoking a shocked outcry. It was Kandaulo's good fortune that Major Carter's fury did not affect her marksmanship, and perhaps it would teach him not to employ the term `woman' in a pejorative fashion. Teal'c did not wait for this, admittedly unlikely, event to occur. He joined his team mate.
"It's Colonel O'Neill's Beretta, and it doesn't look like he dropped it deliberately. The safety was off, and there are three rounds left in the magazine, counting the one he'd chambered." She swiped rain water from her face, and her voice sounded rough wi
th anxiety. "He said he didn't need backup. Why the hell did I listen to him?"
The Jaffa could have given several answers to this query, none of them helpful. At this stage the evidence suggested that O'Neill had succumbed to vastly superior numbers. Major Carter's presence would have made no difference.
"We should proceed," he advised, silently admitting that he dreaded what else they might come upon.
The ground around the ferns was trampled, footprints converging on it and verifying Teal'c's first impression. A fight had taken place here. Within a short time they had collected two further items: the peculiar seating device the Professor had employed earlier in the evening and a Bowie knife. The knife lay trodden into the soil a few meters away from the location where Major Carter had found the sidearm. There could be little doubt that O'Neill had been disarmed, and that Professor Kelly had indeed been with him.
However, the near total absence of blood was encouraging. Teal'c had seen the massacre on the ship and he had seen the sword lying next to the dead soldier. When these people killed, they killed messily. For the first time since Kandaulo had arrived at Hamilqart's house, he dared to hope. The hope was spurred further by a combination of tracks, which -
"Sam? Teal'c?"
Daniel Jackson had been examining the interior of the complex, and now he approached through the trees, his task evidently completed. What was more, it seemed to have left him agitated enough not to observe where he was going. A frequent occurrence with the young man. He tripped and nearly fell, backtracked and picked up an old-fashioned leather bag.
"Hey! Did you see this? Kelly's bag."
It was indeed. Teal'c received the item, and Daniel Jackson squinted at the small pile that constituted their previous finds.
"I take it Jack was here?" he asked.
"Teal'c and I are leaning towards the idea," said Major Carter. "You come across anything useful?"
"Depends on how you define useful. According to the people in there" - Daniel Jackson cocked a thumb in the direction of the temple - "the first wave of the actual attack came from the roof. While some of the mob staged a mock run on the gate, the boys on the roof rappelled into the courtyard and opened a side door."
"Tactics 101," muttered the Major. "Nice, tidy, almost guaranteed to work."
"Tidy being the operative word, which is where it gets interesting... I mean, you guys know more about this stuff than I do, but compared to the ship this was asking politely. It looks... less angry."
"In what way, Daniel Jackson?"
"No gratuitous butchery. It's still not pretty; the Tyreans took casualties and they've got two men seriously wounded, but it seems to have been a straightforward fight, rather than..." He shrugged. "You know."
Less angry... Teal'c turned the words over in his mind. "I believe your description may be apt, Daniel Jackson. O'Neill killed one of their number, yet they did not kill O'Neill when they had the chance to do so. They abducted him."
"What makes you so sure all of a sudden?" Major Carter gazed at him, the strain in her face easing slightly. Unlike death, capture could be remedied.
Teal'c pointed out the tracks he had noticed just prior to Daniel Jackson's arrival. Two parallel sets of sandal prints scaled the hill. Between them ran a pair of smudged, uninterrupted marks, almost certainly left by boot caps.
"Someone tall and heavy was dragged by two men. I am confident that this person was O'Neill."
"What about Kelly?"
Off to the side yet another trail could be seen. "Professor Kelly was carried. The imprint left by the right foot is deeper. Her abductor must have conveyed her slung over his right shoulder."
Major Carter gave a bleak smile. "Anyone mind if I get Kandaulo and rub his nose in this?"
he groaning was frightful and it wouldn't stop. Drawn-out and labored, it rose at ten-second intervals, ebbed and erupted again, interspersed with reedy sighs. He had a vague but nasty suspicion that he might be responsible for it, because the sheer misery of the noise roughly equaled the torque somebody had applied to that vise around his skull.
Suddenly the groans were overlaid by a new sound, just as drawn-out but less rhythmic in nature. He was fairly certain that, on this score, he couldn't possibly be the offender. Even with all the chili in Mexico both volume and aroma would have been beyond him. The mother of all farts was followed by a second helping, marginally less succulent.
"Graph," he said, not sure what exactly he meant by it.
The good news was that the groans continued. In other words, if he'd been the one saying Gmph, he couldn't be the one doing the groaning.
How about you open your eyes and check, huh?
He was still admiring this sterling piece of advice when a whole new insight wafted through the fog that inhabited his brain. His current abode moved. To be precise, it rolled. Pitched. Swayed.
"Oh crap," mumbled Colonel Jonathan `Jack' O'Neill, USAF.
In response, something velvety snuffled across his face and began nibbling at his hair. Sweet. He tried to swat at the snuffly velvet thing and noticed that he could barely move his arms. There probably was a connection between the vise and the fact that his hands were shackled.
"Lookee here! Who's returning from the Land of Nod?" said a voice, not quite identifiable yet, but already grating on his nerves. "Wakey-wakey, duckie!"
His eyes snapped open, from dismay if nothing else, adding to his list of excellent reasons for which to throttle Miss Marple. The abrupt onslaught of light, dim as it was, tightened the vise by several notches. Fighting the urge to pass out again, he had a go at orienting himself. He was lying on a pallet of dank straw, which presumably explained the stalks in his mouth. The pallet hugged a curved wall of wooden planks and had an opposite number. Kelly sat on that, looking offensively cheerful, despite the fact that she was trussed up as well.
"Marvellous, isn't it?" she chirped. "Cricklebottom and Haig claim that Phoenician ships had no hold compartments. Morons!"
She'd said the `s'-word.
Jack allowed himself a moment of empathy with Messrs Crinklebutt and Haze and set about regaining something that approximated an upright position. No point in postponing the inevitable, and the endeavor might help him forget Kelly's presence for a while.
Oh yeah... His head vigorously disagreed with the sit-up. Somebody else seemed to disagree too. An indignant snort buzzed into his ear, and tiny warm flecks of spittle sprayed the left side of his face. Looking up, he found himself staring at a snuffly, velvety, hairy snout. It belonged to one of two horses chained to metal rings in the floor. Mr and Mrs Ed shared their fate with his right ankle. Nice.
Wood, hemp, and canvas emitted a symphony of groans, and their cell lurched into a violent sequence of rolls and pitches. The horses took it stoically, unlike his stomach. That flipped. On the upside, it let the headache pale to insignificance. Breathing slowly and deeply through his mouth, he struggled to ignore the cold sweat and to focus on the horses. He faintly remembered something to do with horses. Something to do with dangling sideways in front of a saddle, his nose colliding with a pungent flank at each jolt... jolt... lousy choice of words under the circumstances...
Through the wooden grate that locked off their end of the hold he could see two rows of benches. On them fourteen bulky men pulled at bulky oars. The queasy reality of the `s'-word became less and less deniable. Then again, it could be worse. He could have a starring role in this B-picture remake of Ben Hur and be out there, pulling away to avoid the wrath of some seven-foot meatball with a cat o' nine tails.
"I'm amazedwe're still alive," Kelly remarked conversationally. "They're Romans."
"I thought they were Phrygians." It came out a little clipped. Talking caused a hideous upward motion in his gorge.
"Maybe it's a disguise. They speak Latin, and all their equipment and weapons are Roman. Bloody barbarians!"
Barbarians? The Romans? Jack had an inkling that Crinklebutt and Haze might have argued with that, but he didn't feel f
it enough to take up the gauntlet. "Why didn't you get out of there?"
"One of those plonkers was threatening to cut your throat." She shrugged. "He sounded convincing."
"Oh," he said, wondering if he should ask who or what a plonker was.
"Is that all you can say? Oh?"
As a matter of fact, yes. Beyond the grate the front echelon of oarsmen soared skywards, while the pallet dropped out from under Jack in a seesaw countermove. This time one of the groans had definitely been his. Hot on its heels a fist of nausea raced up his throat, and he tasted bile. Eyes narrow, Kelly peered at him.
"Lie down," she recommended.
"I'm fine!"
If he told himself long enough, it might come true. And even if it didn't, there was no way on P2X 159 that he'd barf his guts out in front of Miss Marple. No! Way!
Then two things happened. They were catapulted from the trough they'd sunk into seconds ago, and Mr Ed chose that precise moment to vent his terminal flatulence. Again. Jack lunged for a bucket that stood by the foot of the pallet and barely made it. After five minutes of retching he'd graduated mostly to dry heaves. Kelly was still watching him with scientific interest.
"You're seasick."
Oh yes. She definitely had a knack for diagnosing the obvious.
"Why the hell do you think I joined the Air Force instead of the Navy?" he gurgled and dived over the bucket again.
"Because nobody in their right mind would want to wear those poncy bell-bottoms?"
Jack was surprised enough to abandon his intestinal calisthenics for a wry grin. "That too... By the way, I won't be held responsible for the consequences if you make me lau-"
Just in case he added a free demonstration, in the course of which he noticed that something was missing.
"Where's my radio?" he croaked once he'd finished the current round.
"I think it spooked them. They threw it away."
Great. This day just kept getting better and better. "It spooked them? How?"
"It started talking. That girl was trying to contact you."
Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 Page 7
