George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (45 page)

“And I came for you.”

That made him happy. “I have dreamed of you. But how could you know where I was?”

“The whole world knows where you are, my gallant knight. Every time your friend Hive uploads a new installment of his blog, a million people read about your latest exploits.”

“A million?” Klaus had no idea. “So many?”

“This week. By next week it will be ten million, if Hive is still alive. No one likes to find bugs crawling through their dirty laundry, least of all a caliph.”

“The Caliph will be pleased, then. Jonathan is going home.”

“Is he? Clever lad. He’ll live to blog again. You should go with him, Klaus. And take your friend John Fortune.”

“John will not leave. The Living Gods are his people.”

“Sekhmet’s
people, you mean.” She took his hand. “Klaus, you are being used. The Living Gods are no more gods than the characters at Disney World. We’ve known for half a century that the wild card has a psychological component, so it is hardly surprising that here in the shadow of the pyramids some of those afflicted should mimic the forms of Isis, Osiris, and the rest, but to suggest that they
are
those gods…Kemel, the man who started this cult, belongs up there with Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard. Take a closer look at your new friends, love. They are very good at accepting offerings, you’ll find, but not quite so apt when it comes to answering prayers.”

This was a side of Lili that Klaus had not seen in America. There it had been all wine and kisses and laughter, and secrets whispered in the dark. Now she was confusing him. He was good at fighting with a sword, but not so good with words. “They are jokers,
ja
, I know, but the Muslims mean to kill them all—”

“Abdul-Alim
means to kill them all, yes. He is desperate to prove himself a strong man and end the whispers that say he is a weakling and a fool. Do not paint all Muslims with the bloody brush. The situation is more complex than that. The Nur was the most charismatic leader Islam has produced since Baybars, yet it took him twenty years to unite all of Arabia and restore the caliphate. Abdul the Idiot will destroy it all in twenty months. When he falls, the rule will pass to Siraj of Transjordan, who is a moderate, a secularist, and a pragmatist. Prince Siraj is a good man. Under him, the Arabs will have peace and prosperity, the West will get its oil, and the Living Gods and their poor deluded worshippers will be left to live in peace.”

“Those that are not dead,” said Klaus.

“Those that are not dead,” she agreed. “First Abdul-Alim must fall, however. And your presence here has only served
to prop him up. Nothing unites a quarrelsome people faster than a threat from outside. Do you know what they are calling you on Al Jazeera?
The Crusader.
”

“The crusaders were brave men,” Klaus said stoutly.

“I do not have time to argue Bohemond of Antioch with you, my sweet. Just take my word, ‘crusader’ is not a term of endearment in this part of the world. All you are doing is giving Abdul the visible enemy that he needs to stay in power. And now that Bahir has failed him, he means to send the Righteous Djinn against you.”

Klaus crossed his arms against his chest. “I defeated Bahir. I can defeat this djinn as well. I do not fear any foe.”

“Fear this one. Eighteen months ago, the Israeli ace Sharon Cream went missing. The strongest woman in the world, they say, yet when the Mossad found her body, it was gray and shriveled, like a fly after the spider has sucked the juice out of it. Her flesh turned to dust when they opened her for an autopsy.

“The Djinn’s first public appearance came a few weeks later. He lifted up an armored car and threw it forty feet. That was enough to earn him a place in the Caliph’s guard, but not enough to excite much interest in the West. Strongmen are a dinar a dozen, and the Nur had other aces in his service.

“He also had General Sayyid, the crippled giant, his right hand and closest friend. Even in his youth Sayyid had struggled to support his own weight, and twenty years ago an American ace shattered both his legs to pieces. He never walked again. No one was surprised when Sayyid finally passed away. The Nur gave him a lavish state funeral in Damascus, but his casket was kept sealed and he never lay in state. Among the mourners was the Righteous Djinn, grown to gigantic size. He stood thirty feet tall…and he had the strength to support that weight.

“Since then, several of the Port Said aces have vanished under mysterious circumstances, the heroes who turned back the Israeli armies during the wars of 1948. Old now, and sickly, but still… Kopf is one who is missing. In 1948 an entire Israeli army broke and ran from him, seized by a terror no one could explain. And now we hear reports that two of the Caliph’s brothers died of fear after a visit from the Djinn.

“You are seeing the pattern here, I hope. Your power is formidable, but you would do well to stay away from the Righteous Djinn, unless you mean to armor him in ghost steel.”

Klaus stared at her. “How could you know all this?”

“I had my own encounter with the Righteous Djinn. After that…let us say I took an interest in him. Never go to battle blind,
mein Ritter.
It pays to do your homework.” She slipped her arms through his and laid her head against his chest. “Come away with me, Klaus. I know a lovely castle on the Rhine. A roaring fire, a canopy bed, and me. What more could you desire?”

“Nothing,” said Klaus. “When this is done.”

“Now. This moment. Kiss me, and I’ll take you there.”

He wanted her as badly as he had ever wanted a woman. Yet, instead of taking her in his arms, Klaus stepped away from her and said, “Take me…how could you take me there?”

The half-smile returned, teasing. “I have my ways.”

Suddenly he understood. “You are an ace.”

“I abhor that word. So crass, so common, so
American.
I prefer to call myself a
woman of mystery
, thank you very much.”

The world shifted under his feet.
Lili of the lamplight
, he thought,
our beautiful chance meeting, the night we spent making love and talking.
All of it suddenly seemed unreal. He could feel it dissolving, melting away like his ghost steel after a battle.
An ace, and here in Egypt.
“What powers?”

“That would be telling. A gentleman
never
asks a lady her age, her weight, or whether she can fly. There are some who call me the Queen of the Night. Do you know your Mozart, love?
The Magic Flute?
No, you are more of a Wagner man, I think.
The Ride of the Valkyries, ja?
Let me be your valkyrie. I can promise you a ride that you will never forget.”

Klaus had wanted more than a ride. Klaus had wanted all of it, all of her. Now he was not sure. “When this is done—that will be the time for us. Not now. It is like our song, like
Lili Marlene.
He wants to be with her, the soldier, she is all he thinks about, but he must go to war, he must do his duty. His honor demands it. It is the same for me.”

“You’re wrong. This is not your country. This is not your fight. Go home, Lohengrin. You won’t find your grail in Egypt. Only your grave.” Lili stepped away from him. “I see I am wasting my breath. It is written on that stubborn German face of yours.
Auf Wiedersehen
, Klaus. I wish you well, truly…though, if I were you, I would start sleeping in my ghost steel. The next time Bahir comes for you, he may be in earnest.”

“Wait,” Klaus called out. “How can I reach you? Where do you live? Your name—is your name even Lili?”

“Close enough, darling. Try
Lilith
.” And she slipped into the shadows and was gone.

The noisy, crowded, festering camp that had sprung up around the Colossi of Memnon had blown away in less than three days. Only trash and night soil remained to show where thousands had lived, loved, and starved for weeks on end. Klaus would not have been surprised to see the colossi themselves rise from their ruined thrones and stride off toward the south.

“‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’”
said Jonathan, as the two of them paused for a last look. “Lord Byron, man. I think he wrote it about these two guys. Bad boy Byron. He was like the Drummer Boy of the romantic poets.”

The
Pharaoh
had departed two days ago, carrying Taweret, most of the other gods, and almost all the priests. She was a large and luxurious boat, rated at five stars by the ministry of tourism, so the Living Gods had found room on her to take abroad five hundred of their followers. They would have taken Jonathan as well, but he did not turn up to board. “I overslept,” Hive kept insisting. “What, am I the first guy who ever missed a boat?” He blamed his cell phone. “Fucking alarm never went off. If I get killed, someone needs to sue Sprint.”

Yesterday Sobek had departed, accompanied by Red Anubis, Min, Unut, Thoth, and several others. The crocodile god
had managed to piece together a convoy of seventeen large vehicles: moving vans, semis, school buses, cattle trucks, flatbeds, dump-trucks, and the like. Somehow he’d struck a deal with General Yusuf and obtained petrol enough to get them down to Aswan, two hundred kilometers to the south. Then he crammed them full with children, as many as each vehicle could carry. In some cases he had to tear them from a mother’s arms, but most parents were eager to find their sons and daughters a place on one of Sobek’s trucks.

Gamel and Tut were among the last to climb aboard. “We stay with Lohengrin,” Gamel insisted. “Watch motorbike. One euro.” Klaus slammed the gate shut on his protests, and slapped the truck to send it off. The smaller children were weeping when the convoy finally began to roll. Jonathan took pictures of their tear-streaked faces with his cell phone.

The congestion was horrendous, both lanes thick with old cars, bikes, motor scooters, rusted vans and panel trucks, even taxicabs. Some drove along the shoulders, while others straddled the center line, advancing with fits and starts, bumping people out of the way. Abandoned vehicles sat rusting on both sides of the road, a few squarely in the middle. The ones that had not been abandoned quite yet were all honking angrily at the tangle of foot traffic, like a flock of huge steel geese. Klaus had become convinced that every car in Egypt had its horn wired to its brake pedal, so any stop or slowdown produced a blast of noise.

They saw four women and a boy trying to pull a horse wagon of the sort his father used to carry tourists up the mountain. Jonathan took a picture with his cell phone. They saw a mother with three infants on her back, and a man with a wrinkled old woman slung across his shoulders. Jonathan snapped them both. They even saw a thin young girl pushing a wire grocery cart as tall as she was. Inside it was a squalling infant with a missing leg, on a bed of rags. “A poignant image of displacement,” said Jonathan, as he took the picture. Hundreds clutched backpacks, suitcases, and bundles, and all of them were shoving, stumbling into one another in their haste to get away. Some appeared to be near the point of collapse. Klaus had seldom felt so angry or so helpless as he did
watching the human river flow past him. He wondered how many would live long enough to see Lake Nasser.

“It’s time.” John Fortune was mounted on a l ong-necked Arabian mare, a lean red horse bred for the desert sands.

Klaus mounted up beside him on an Arab mare as black as the Egyptian night, while Jonathan climbed gingerly onto an old dun-colored gelding. Hive had his legs today, but under his
keffiyeh
both his ears were missing, along with his pinkies, ring fingers, and two toes off each foot. Klaus had not inquired about his genitals, although it struck him that Jonathan had sent out more wasps than could be accounted for with just some toes and fingers.

The horses were a parting gift from Sobek. “They will not run out of gasoline, at least,” the crocodile god had told them. John Fortune turned out to be a skilled rider. He’d gotten a pony for his seventh birthday, he told Klaus, and had taken riding lessons all through his teenage years. “Never rode without a helmet, though. Mom was afraid that if I fell it would trigger my wild card and turn me into a bowling ball with tentacles.”

Or a fire-breathing lion.
Klaus was good with horses too, though these spirited Arabians were more temperamental than his father’s huge German plow pullers.

Sobek had seen to their clothing, too, providing them with Bedouin garb better suited to the red lands than denim cutoffs and
American Hero
T-shirts. “Hey, cool,
Lawrence of Arabia,”
Jonathan had enthused when the three of them donned their Arab clothing for the first time. In his blog he wrote that John Fortune made a good Omar Sharif and Lohengrin could pass for Peter O’Toole on steroids, but “Anthony Quinn I’m not, though I did like him in that Zorro the Greek flick.”

The whole world was moving south, but the three of them rode north. Jonathan’s wasps had seen detachments from the Egyptian Third Army moving rapidly down the Nile. They had guns and tanks and planes, just as Sobek had foreseen. Wherever they encountered jokers they shot them out of hand. With them came the jackals of Ikhlas al-Din, flying the flag of the caliphate.