Sam picked up the laptop, rose, and held it in front of her so that the Synod could watch the screen.
"The Chappa'ai!" The gasp was communal. Even Tendao yelped.
Score One. Daniel knew the script for this part of the performance. It was the second UAV launch. He'd shot the footage himself yesterday, by ways of entertaining Hamilqart. On the screen, the event horizon exploded outward into torrential rain, and as soon as it had retracted, the small surveillance plane broke from the iridescent blue surface. There followed a wobbly pan, tracing the UAV's course above the temple.
"Bird of Meleq!" Hamilgart exclaimed on cue, if in breach of Synod protocol.
"Yes," confirmed Sam. "It's a bird of Meleq, and it can see everything. There's no hiding from it."
Score Two. They'd discussed this last night. Playing on religious superstition was dangerous because they might be caught out. But the quickest and possibly the only way of getting Jack and Dr. Kelly back was with the help of the Tyreans. If obtaining that help required a little bit of Ala Kazaam, so be it.
"So this bird is sent by the Lord Meleq?" Kandaulo asked. "Then how is it that we have never seen its like before?"
"You've watched it fly from the Chappa'ai with your own eyes, haven't you?" Sam had pasted on her most sincere face and dodged the question. "Of course you know that the Chappa'ai is the gate to Lord Meleq's realm."
Hamilgart stirred and whispered, "But didn't you
"Shh," Daniel hissed, furiously trying of think of something that didn't completely contradict what he'd told the man yesterday. "Our world is a part of Meleq's realm called `Earth'. There are many such places, and they all have different names."
"Oh. I understand," murmured Hamilgart, not sounding convinced. "So you do "
"Shh," hissed the acolyte.
Dr. Jackson could have kissed him. Mercifully none of the Synod had caught on to the exchange. They were too fascinated by the Meleq's bird's eye view of their coastline and the archipelago through a turgid cover of rain and fog. The main feature had started - footage taken by the UAV itself - and Sam was letting it play relentlessly, so that the priests could acclimatize to this strange perspective. Leaden sea, leaden clouds, wisps of mist that ripped past the lens, interspersed with the occasional island and squeals from Tendao who was seeing dolphins. Pink dolphins, likely as not. Somebody should have brought popcorn. It ran on for a stultifying twenty minutes, until even Teal'c got fidgety.
A stout elderly priest with an incongruously narrow face and thyroid eyes that lent him a look of perpetual surprise had (correctly) identified three Tyrean colonies and pointed out the site of a minor naval skirmish with the Phrygians.
Suddenly he said, "Lord Meleq's bird is flying toward the Forbidden Islands. Nobody can live there. The mountains breathe molten stone and the air is poison."
"Not everywhere," replied Sam. "The bird tells me so."
"Then the bird is lying, and it was not sent by Meleq," snarled an emaciated grouch named Fuano and glanced at his High Priest as though he expected applause. "The Lord Meleq created the Forbidden Islands so that no enemy could dwell near us."
"And yet the enemy walks among us!" Kandaulo waved a dismissive hand. After yesterday's exercise in obstruction the guy was turning scarily cooperative. Orders from Meleq?
Sam had picked up on it and directed a sunny smile at him. "The bird of Meleq never lies, Lord Kandaulo. But it can see things that you can only feel. Watch."
Reaching over the screen, she hit a few keys. The video stopped and then changed to the false color recording of the thermal imaging unit the UAV had carried on the second sortie. The picture turned into blue background dotted with blobs of various sizes, spanning the spectrum from green to yellow to red.
"What is this?" The grouch squinted at the laptop.
"I like it," Tendao cawed. "It is colorful. Much more entertaining than the other place. Where is it? I want to go there."
"It... uh... is the same place, Lord Tendao." A smile edged Sam's voice. "Only now Meleq's bird sees hot and cold. Blue is coldest, red is hottest."
"Nonsense, girl! I may be decrepit, but I am not a fool! This cannot be the same place!"
"No, Tendao! She tells the truth!" The guy with the thyroid condition and the above-average grasp of map-reading had half slid off his throne. A stubby finger pointed at the screen. "I can only surmise, as none of us have ever sailed there, but those red shapes must belong to the Forbidden Islands. You were not entirely wrong, Fuano."
"He is saying you were not entirely right either," Tendao cut in happily.
The hobby geographer ignored him. "The red shapes, they are islands of molten stone, yes?"
Major Carter nodded. "But you'll notice that there are many others around."
"Yes. They are green. What does that mean?"
"It means the molten stone has cooled. They're habitable."
"This cannot be!" shouted Fuano. "The Lord Meleq would never permit it!"
"Priest! Who are you to decide what the Lord Meleq would permit?"
It took Daniel a couple of seconds to reconcile that roar with his team mate. They'd agreed the Jaffa should push the spirit thing wheneverhe sawfit. Evidently, Teal'c enjoyed his own performance. Staff clasped firmly, he successfully radiated supernatural pique. Several of the priests seemed cowed.
"The Lord Spirit is right. Meleq's ways are not for us to judge. It may well be a challenge to rouse us from our complacency. I have warned you of this before, but you would not listen." Kandaulo, once again oozing tractability. This was getting freaky. "Please, Lady Samantha, continue."
The UAV spent a minute or so crossing a long, empty stretch of blue. Then, directly below, a pair of faint yellow dots slipped into view. Sam didn't wait for the questions.
"Those are ships. What you're seeing as yellow is the heat generated by the people on board. They must be Phrygian. I don't suppose any Tyrean would be reckless enough to brave the wrath of Lord Meleq."
Mute nods from everyone, and Tendao croaked, "I like her. She thinks."
"I've plotted the course of those ships," Sam carried on, pressing her advantage. "And this is where they were going."
The UAV slipped into a gentle eastward turn and headed for a jumble of green and red splotches that steadily grew bigger. It was a group of five large islands, all of them more or less round, which suggested volcanic origin, two of them predominantly red. Active volcanoes. The remaining three lay about twenty miles apart from each other and one of them showed a small, concentrated area of yellow.
"What is this?" asked their friend, the hobby geographer.
"Watch."
She switched the image back to a video recording taken on the third sortie. They looked on as the surveillance craft closed in on one of the islands, lost altitude, and began to circle, hugging the steep, craggy rim of a crater. In the valley below they could make out tilled land, meadows, a few scattered farm animals, and the yellow blob had become a garrison surrounded by wooden battlements. The image froze.
"You believe this island is the destination of the ships?" the High Priest asked.
"Yes."
"Will you show us how to find this island?"
This was the tricky part. Daniel held his breath and just about crossed his fingers.
"I can guide you there," replied Sam.
Kandaulo inhaled sharply. "Guide us there? What do you mean?"
"I mean, Lord Kandaulo, that unless you or one of your priests can figure out how to work this... box" - she raised the laptop a little - "you'll have to take me and my friends with you."
Score Three.
he anteroom was quiet, except for the continual soft plinking and gurgling of water somewhere beyond solid masonry. He flopped onto a stone bench and settled in to wait. The wall opposite was painted an earthy red and pierced by a pair of short adjoining hallways with doors at the end: boys' bath and girls' bath.
Without that, etiquette would have demanded that he miss out on undilut
ed luxury. Hot tubs and cold tubs and a steam room and, miracle of miracles, antiquated but functional shaving gear. He'd had the place practically to himself. The only other living soul he'd met was a gnarled old fellow who ghosted around pillars and kept the stacks of towels topped up. The old boy also had shown him how to use those weird curved blades they called strigil. Basically the native idea of a washcloth - less fluffy, though. You slathered oil all over you so that your skin would stay where it belonged and then used the blade to scrape off the grease. Or, in his case, grease and five cartloads of filth. Odds were they'd have to change the water and decontaminate the pools before they let anyone else in there.
He stretched, attempted to shrug a little better into the coarse tunic he was wearing, and decided that no amount of wriggling would improve the fit - or the scratch. But given that he'd spent most of his adult life in couture of the one size fits all or else! type, he didn't really have much reason to complain. In fact, apart from a certain absence of personal freedom, he had no reason to complain. Which was the weird part. The more he saw of these folks, the less they gelled with the picture the Tyreans had painted.
Suddenly a creak and shuffling and voices punctuated the silence. Kelly emerged from the girls', all pink and freshly strigiled and trailed by her voluptuous escort who looked frazzled. No doubt the good Professor could be every bit as irritating in Latin as she was in English. With reason this time. Whatever they called the costume she wore, it brought back fond memories of Carter modeling for the Shavadai sewing circle. Minus the headdress.
"Not a word, duckie! I'm warning you!"
"I wasn't gonna say anything."
"Then stop ogling me like I'm the Queen of Sheba!"
He slipped from the bench before she could get within striking distance and backed off. It wasn't fair. With a little less luck he could have ended up in a toga instead of pants and tunic. Besides, he reckoned he owed her. It had taken him exactly ten seconds to realize that she'd got a taster of his favorite dream. The faulty `mute' switch on his nightmares wasn't reassuring, but Kelly's refusal to pry had at least kept the indignity to a minimum.
"Finivistis?"
Flavius of the easily offended nostril came flying through the outer door and sniffed the air. Evidently the result was satisfactory.
"Festinemus. Tertius iam dudum manet," he diagnosed and herded them through the exit.
Wrestling with fifteen-odd yards of fabric, Kelly trotted after him and informed all English speakers present that their mystery host had been waiting for a while now and that they'd better hurry up.
Around the side of the baths the sunlit square was bustling with people. Reactions were friendly. Nods and grins and whispers, and noisy requests from the under-eighteen bracket of the population to teach them the stunt he' dpulled on Beefcake yesterday. Miss Marple seemed to feel that such requests were to be left uninterpreted at all cost.
She needn't have worried. This morning's foot-in-mouth combat class was cancelled due to a disappointingly short stroll. Flavius led them up the steps to the Internal Revenue palace and whisked them into an assembly hall that drowned in shadows and took up the entire length and width of the structure. Near a window at the back, a group of seven men armed with scrolls and wax tablets huddled around an eighth who was seated in a chair. The huddlers sported togas and behind them hovered four guards.
"Domine Tertie, alieni adeunt," announced their guide.
Scrolls furled, tablets snapped shut, togas rustled as the huddle straightened out, turned around, and goggled with as much decorum as the act of goggling allowed. Jack gently listed towards the Professor.
"I don't know about you, but I feel underdressed."
Kelly looked down her nose at him, which was a remarkable achievement, seeing that she was two heads shorter than he. "I strongly suggest you leave the talking to me, duckie. They won't understand your blather anyway, and if that isn't a Godsend, I don't know what is."
The troops seemed to agree and took a collective step forward.
"Cedete!"
The goggling toga brigade quit goggling and exchanged dubious glances, but the guards froze as ordered.
"Hospes mei sunt!"
Guests?
The speaker was the guy in the chair, and Jack could have sworn he'd heard the voice before. With deliberate slowness the man rose and advanced to the middle of the hall. He stood motionless, unprotected and half concealed by the gloom. A hand extended and hung there expectantly.
Waiting to say Hi?
It felt more like some ritual or a bizarre kind of test. Test of what? He dimly recalled a theory on how the common garden variety handshake had originated as a token of being unarmed. Trust, parley, that sort of thing.
What would Daniel do? Easy. Over the protests of the crabby guy on whose uniform it said Colonel somewhere, Daniel would be in there and mesmerize everyone with the peaceful explorers from the planet Earth spiel.
"Don't even think of it!" Kelly hissed from the corner of her mouth.
Okay.
Just as slowly and deliberately, Jack started walking up to the man, one eye on the guards to check if they were showing any signs of life-threatening concern. Nobody moved. Behind him whirred a noise like steam escaping from a kettle; Miss Marple airing her displeasure. Tough.
The moment he was close enough to see the face, he knew why the voice had sounded so familiar. Their host still wore the Phrygian outfit, but he cleaned up nicely. Without the layer of grime and that subservient stoop he'd adopted for waltzing through Tyros, he looked smarter, fitter, more dangerous. The lack of floppy headwear might have something to do with it as well. Keen hazel eyes betrayed a flicker of amusement. He'd clocked Jack's reaction and gave a faint smile.
"Yes," said Papa Smurf. "We meet again."
Talk about cliche. But at least it was English.
The hand still hung there.
Jack clasped it and sensed the tension in the room ease. The room did better than he. He just about hopped with surprise when a thumb dug in firmly between the second and third knuckles of his right. Which would make Papa Smurf, a bit anachronistically, a Master Mason. Now what? Return the handshake and try to bluff it out or stick to the truth?
Truth implied trusting these folks. Regrettably he had certain problems with the concept. Last time he'd trusted somebody, he'd ended up with a little buddy upstairs whose travel plans and lovelife hadn't exactly been a barrel of laughs. Truth was, these days he barely trusted anyone to even touch him.
Great timing on the violins, O'Neill! How about making up your mind? Truth or dare...
Papa Smurf's turn to hop. "You're not one of us!"
"No."
"Yet you took my hand?"
As a matter of fact, they still stood there, hands laced like love's young dream. But somehow it seemed wiser to wait until his new pal made a move to let go.
"I did," Jack replied softly. "It's a question of faith, isn't it?"
"Like admitting to friendship with a Jaffa?"
"There's Jaffa and then there's Jaffa. If I didn't have faith, he and I wouldn't be friends, and I'd probably be dead a few times over."
"You have courage."
Or a screw loose. Purely a matter of opinion.
The man finally let go of his hand and took a step back for scrutiny. "Whom do you serve?"
"Not the Goa'uld."
"He befriends Jaffa, but he doesn't serve the Goa'uld." The laughter that followed rippled on through the toga brigade, but it signaled astonishment rather than disbelief. "And he doesn't like answering questions either."
"I'm over my daily limit already. How about we swap? You're Tertius?"
"Yes." He grinned. "I'm the primus pilus here. You know what that means?"
It means I outrank you, Captain, Jack thought but didn't say it. "You run this outfit."
"I do. You are a soldier, aren't you?"
"Yes." Airman, really, but the Captain probably wouldn't grasp the distinction.
&nb
sp; "Your rank?"
"I'm a colonel."
"I..." Tertius blinked. "I am not familiar with that."
Ah. He'd looked it up when they'd been cramming Latin for countless loops. He knew he had. Joseph Mallozzi, PhD, hadn't been familiar with it either, so Jack had abandoned Latin for the Novice in favor of a dictionary. Teal'c had been peeved because Roman ranks didn't have any equivalent to First Prime. Damn, what was it? Two words... He'd been pleased when he'd found it, but his brush with vanity had been short-lived once he realized that he'd have had to run around in a toga instead of one of those nifty leather skirts and a breastplate.
"Tribunus laticlavius sum."
The toga boys broke into whispers, and the troops snapped to attention, fists thudding on chests. From Kelly's end floated something that sounded like Miserable Paddy! Presumably it had more to do with linguistics than with his rank.
Tertius had gone a little pale, as though he expected to get his ear chewed off first and an order to fall on his sword second. "Paeniteo, domine," he apologized. "Please, come with me."
At the back of the hall another chair had materialized, and Tertius steered him towards this cozy little seating arrangement. Togas fluttered out of his way, and the guards had stopped breathing. If Goonius and Beefcake got wind of this, they'd probably feel compelled to disembowel themselves. Nodding at the second chair, his host sat and Jack joined him. On the wall above their heads loomed a large stone medallion that showed a young man in tunic and pants and the Phrygian cap. He kneeled on the flank of a fallen bull, forcing back its head, about to slash the throat.
Some sixth sense warned Jack that he was being studied while studying the relief. "What?"
"Do you recognize him?" Tertius smiled that faint, knowing smile again.
They worship the bull-slayer the one sworn to destroy the Lord Meleq.
Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 Page 12
