Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 (18 page)

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 undiluted 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!"

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