George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (41 page)

“You get them, Lohengrin!”
Tut shouted, as Klaus fed some fumes to the engine.
“You kill them good!”

Over ground like this, he dare not push the Royal Enfield too hard. Even at a sprinter’s pace it rattled so badly that he feared it might shake itself to pieces before he reached John Fortune. A nimbus of white light played about his head, took form, became a warhelm with a narrow eye slit and swan’s wings sprouting from the temples. A motorcyle helmet it was not, but Klaus had faith that the ghost steel would protect him in a spill.

Turning west and south, he wove a crooked path through the squalor of the camp, bouncing past the hulk of an abandoned school bus where a dozen families now were living. Behind the bus, the carcass of a dog was turning over a cook-fire that stank of burning camel dung. A cloud of wasps trailed after Klaus, glimmering and winking in the sunlight. A joker whose face had sprouted dozens of small heads threw a rock at them as they went by, and a dark-eyed woman with a child at her breast gave Klaus a lingering look, as if to say,
You are not one of us. What are you doing here?

Some nights Klaus would ask that selfsame question as he twisted in his sleeping bag on the hard ground, wondering if that was a scorpion crawling up his leg or just another of Jonathan’s wasps. Barbarossa would mock at him for coming here, he knew, and most of the other aces of the Reichsbanner would consider him a fool. He had thought to find in them a modern Round Table, where heroes broke bread together and talked of righting wrong, but the only wrong they wished
to right involved their tax rates. “You expected more,
ja?
“ Barbarossa said afterward, when he and Klaus escaped the feast for a beer garden in Heidelberg’s student quarter. “You are young. You will learn. It is all cartels and sponsors now. Mighty Euro and Mighty Dollar are more powerful than any ace on earth. They own us,
ja.
”

“Not me,” Klaus had insisted. “My honor is not for sale.”

Barbarossa pinched his cheek. “Keep your honor. It’s your smile they will buy, your big blue eyes and pale blond hair, and these apple cheeks of yours.”

He was right, and I was wrong.
His first endorsement had been a local dairy that offered him five hundred euros to say their milk helped him grow up big and strong. Klaus had resisted at first, but his mother said he should do it for the children, that milk was good for children, and maybe they could go as high as a thousand euros. That was a lot of money, so Klaus drank the milk and smiled for the cameras. Other endorsements followed, until finally he signed with an agent and she brought him BMW. He loved his motorcycle, and loved the freedom that fame and money brought him, but sometimes at night he still felt like a fraud, no different from the hollow heroes of the Reichsbanner, who took adulation as their due but never did a thing to earn it. Yet, what had he done since Neuschwanstein? Nothing but smile and sign “Lohengrin” on pictures of himself. That was no life for an ace, or for a knight. There was no honor in it.

The road wound back and forth as it made its way through the hills down into the valley known as Biban al-Harim, where the tombs of eighty ancient Egyptian queens were sunk into the dry and stony soil. Klaus was banking round a curve and wondering how long his fuel would last when he heard the sound of gunfire ahead.

Jackals
, was his first and only thought. That was the name that Jonathan had given to the rabble of Ikhlas al-Din, the Muslim fundamentalists who had been swept to victory in Egypt’s last election. It was not enough for them to drive the
Living Gods and their worshippers from their homes. All the long way south, they had continued to hound the refugees, raiding their camps, picking off stragglers, even burning villages and poisoning wells along the way to deny them water, food, and fuel.

Even here
, Klaus thought grimly,
even now.
Pale light danced around him, hardened, became breastplate, greaves, gorget, gauntlets. He leaned into a turn and accelerated, pushing the old motorbike as fast as it would go, and leaving Jonathan’s wasps well behind. A little farther on, he came upon a woman clutching her child by the hand as blood streamed down her face. She flinched at his approach, and Klaus did not have the time to set her fears at ease. He screamed past her, his armor shining. The gunfire grew louder, staccato bursts that echoed off the hills. He could hear other sounds as well, shouts and screams, the roar of some great beast and the chudder of a helicopter’s rotors.

The jackals had no helicopters.
The army
, Klaus thought,
the army has moved in to stop them.
For a moment he was relieved.

When the valley opened up before him, Klaus hit his brakes and swerved to a sudden halt in a spray of dust and pebbles. He let his helm dissolve for a moment to give himself a better view, but even so, it took him a long moment to understand what he was seeing. The camp down there was much smaller than the one by the colossi, and half of it was in flames, rag tents and cardboard shacks alike sending up greasy pillars of smoke into the sky. A truck was burning, too, a large flatbed with a green canvas awning. Corpses littered the ground. Through the smoke he saw armed men moving, dim shapes with automatic rifles in their hands. He heard rifles chattering, a woman wailing. Above it all the helicoper moved, firing at something on the ground.

Some of the wounded had rushed toward the nearest of the ancient tombs and were trying to tear down its steel scissors gate to seek refuge inside. Klaus saw three men appear behind them and open up, raking the refugees with bullets. Their bodies danced and jerked under the impacts, like marionettes gone mad.

And then the lioness appeared. Even from a distance she was huge, larger than a pony, almost as big as the draft horses that pulled his father’s wagon up the mountain. Flame swirled from her jaws as she leapt onto the soldiers. Two fell screaming, wreathed in fire. The third she opened from throat to crotch, tearing at his intestines until the helicopter’s shadow fell across them. Then she whirled to leap, but the copter was beyond her reach. Klaus saw her hammered to the ground by a stream of machine gun fire, heard her roar of pain, saw the bullets kicking up dust all around her as she turned and raced away.

Jackals do not have helicopters.
Through the smoke and dust, Klaus could see the uniforms, patterned in the tan-and-dun of desert camouflage.
Not jackals. Those are soldiers. It is the Egyptian army doing this.
This time he would not be facing paint-ball guns, or the cheap Czech pistols of the Bavarian Freedom Front. The jackals had always fled before him after a perfunctory shot or two, but these men were trained and disciplined, and there looked to be a lot of them.
But none with my armor.

At Peenemünde, the scientists had argued for months about the nature of that armor. Doktor Fuchs theorized that it was made of coherent light, Doktor Alpers suspected quantum particles, and Doktor Hahn coined the term “hardened ectoplasm.” Klaus did not understand half of what they said, so he went on calling it
ghost steel.
Even after six months of study, the scientists still could not say with certainty whether it was made of energy or matter, but their tests did show that it was impervious to knives, axes, bullets, flamethrowers, acid, shrapnel, lightning bolts, and everything else that they could find to throw at him. The Egyptian soldiers were not nearly as well-armed as the good doktors. There was nothing they could do to harm him.

Klaus fed the motorbike a little gas and gathered speed as he went rolling down the hill. Mists shimmered around his head and became his warhelm again, its wide white wings outstretched. When he raised his hand his sword appeared, shining bright.
Today we will give Jonathan something true to blog about
, he thought.

Afterward, Klaus could not have said how many men he had faced, or how many he had slain.

The smoke from the fires drifted everywhere, acrid and choking, so thick at times that friend and foe alike seemed to vanish and reappear like phantoms in a dream. Sounds echoed in his ears—screams, shouts, the whine of rifles and the chudder of the big machine gun, the chopping of the helicopter’s blades, Sekhmet’s terrifying roars. The she-lion was off to his right, behind him, just ahead; try as he might, Klaus could not find her. At times he could have sworn there were two of her.

He had no trouble finding the soldiers, though. The first man he slew was coughing when he emerged from the smoke, but as soon as he saw Lohengrin he raised his rifle.
“Yield!”
Klaus called out to him. “Throw down your weapon, and I will not harm you.” Instead the soldier dropped to one knee and squeezed his trigger. Klaus saw the muzzle flash. The round struck him near the temple and caromed off. “You cannot harm me,” he warned the man, his voice booming through his warhelm. “Yield.” The soldier fired again, and then a third time. By then Klaus was on top of him. When he swung his sword, the man raised the rifle to protect himself, but the ghost steel blade sliced through stock and barrel and opened him from neck to belly.

Klaus did not have the time to watch him die. Other soldiers had appeared by then, and they were firing, too. He gave them all the chance to yield. None did, though a few of them broke and ran when they saw him cutting down their friends. Perhaps they did not have the English to understand what he was saying. Klaus would need to learn the Arabic word for “yield.”

Riding through the smoke and slaughter like a ghost, Lohengrin soon lost all sense of time and place. No blood stained his ghost steel; his armor gleamed white and pure, unblemished, and his blade glimmered palely in his hand.
“God wills it,”
he remembered thinking—though, why any god would will such carnage, the white knight could not have said.

When the fighting ended, Klaus was hardly conscious of it. The fires had burned low by then, and a hot wind out of the red lands to the west had begun to dissipate the smoke. He realized suddenly that he could no longer hear the helicopter. Sekhmet had fallen silent as well. It had been a long while since he had last heard her roar.
John
, he thought.

Jonathan’s wasps had found him by then. They buzzed around his head, the thrum of their wings strangely reassuring. Klaus wondered how much Bugsy had seen of what had happened here. He turned his head, searching for the enemy, but all of the soldiers were dead or fled. Klaus let his sword and helm dissolve, but kept his body clad in ghost steel.
“John!”
he bellowed, rolling slowly across the battlefield.
“John Fortune!”

In the end it was the wasps who found him, sprawled naked by the entrance to a tomb, where he had been protecting the jokers who had taken shelter within. John was drenched in blood, but none of it was his own. When Klaus tried to lift him he gave a gasp of pain. “My ribs,” he said. “I think they broke some. The bullets—they melt when they touch her flesh, but they still hurt. They hit like hammers.”

“You look ghastly,” Klaus admitted.

“I just tore a dozen men to pieces with my fingernails.”

“That was Sekhmet,” said Klaus. “She fought nobly.”

“With my fingers!”
John’s skin was damp with sweat.

He looks forty years old
, Klaus thought. His face had thinned to the point of gauntness, and he had lines around his eyes that had not been there in Hollywood. The red scarab that was Sekhmet sat above his eyes like some huge blood blister, making his forehead seem to bulge the way his famous father’s had bulged when he fought the Astronomer in the sky above Manhattan, a year before Klaus was even born. John’s skin had darkened, too; daily exposure to the harsh Egyptian sun had browned him several shades. That made him look more like Fortunato, too.

Some of the surviving jokers had emerged from the tomb. A hunchbacked woman with snakes for fingers offered Klaus a charred and torn blanket. He wrapped it around John Fortune
to stop his shivering. His smooth brown skin was covered with dark bruises. Klaus unhooked his canteen from his motorbike to give him a drink of water. “Not too much, now,” he cautioned. “Sip.”