Inside Straight

Kemel, the founder of the movement to revive the Old Religion, had dreamed of restoring the ruined temples and making them seats of worship again, but the world’s archeaologists and the ministry of tourism had defeated all his efforts. The ruins were too valuable as ruins; tourists were the life’s blood of Egypt’s economy. Denied access to the ancient sites, Kemel had instead acquired land on the west bank of the Nile, and there erected the great complex called the New Temple, three hundred acres of shrines, altars, fountains, courtyards, gardens, and statuary, with half a dozen Living Gods in permanent residence.

A heaving sea of humanity surrounded the temple walls as they approached. Most nights the priests who served the Living Gods fed whatever beggars had turned up at their gates on lentils and spiced mutton, but not on this night. The temple gates were closed and barred, the road leading to them impassable.

Cursing, Sobek swung the truck off the road and took it wide around, bumping through a cane field to the back gate. Even here the crowds were thick, and they finally had to abandon the vehicle. When the people saw Sekhmet padding toward them, her tawny skin bruised but still aglow, they parted before her like the Red Sea. Some went to their knees, while others salaamed. Klaus followed behind her, all but unnoticed. At the temple gate the guardsmen moved aside when Sobek barked at them in Arabic and snapped his teeth. They reminded Klaus of the Pope’s Swiss pikemen; more ornaments than warriors, they carried tall spears and dressed as warriors of the time of Ramses the Great. No doubt the tourists loved them, but when Klaus tried to imagine them facing the soldiers he had fought today, it made an ugly picture.

Only when they were inside the temple grounds, hidden by the thick walls and velvet shadows, did the lioness halt, shimmer, and transform back into John Fortune. He looks stronger than before, Klaus tried to convince himself. When he spoke to Sobek in Arabic, however, he knew that it was still Sekhmet he was looking at. Sobek barked an order, and two acolytes came hurrying to help escort them to John Fortune’s quarters, while two more went in search of food and water.

John’s bedchamber was in the inner temple, off a corridor lined with ram-headed sphinxes where the younger priests and acolytes were quartered. Though not as large or grand as the suite that Klaus and Jonathan had shared at the Luxor in Las Vegas, the room did have a window overlooking the Nile. Klaus could see the lights of Luxor beyond the river, and the white sails of feluccas shimmering palely in the moonlight. A dozen wasps were crawling on the walls, glistening green; Jonathan was with them, watching.

“I leave him now,” said Sobek, as the acolytes were washing John and dressing him in a linen sleeping gown. “So should you. Eat first, you will be hungry. Then go. He needs to sleep.”

It was true. The body that John shared with the woman Sekhmet had not slept since the day they had burned his mother’s house down and melted her awards. Whenever John closed his eyes, Sekhmet opened them again; when she slept, he woke and took his body back. The flesh that they shared kept going night and day. It was a young body, strong and healthy, but all flesh must rest.

Now it was Sekhmet who was awake, with John asleep within. Klaus was just learning to tell the two of them apart. They spoke with the same voice, but different words. They had the same face, but not the same expressions. Sekhmet used her hands in speaking more than John Fortune ever had. If I had spent twenty years in an amulet, moving would feel good to me as well, Klaus reflected.

Temple servants brought them beer and bowls of lentil stew. Klaus ate it all, though he was sick of lentils. “Sobek intends to go to Aswan,” he said, tearing at a loaf of black bread.

“Sobek is a crocodile. I am a lion.” Sekhmet had eaten only a few bites. The outlines of the scarab were plainly visible through the swollen skin of John Fortune’s brow. “With the power of Ra we might have turned them,” she said, in a weary voice, “but we are only half of what we might have been.”

With the power of Ra, John might have turned the world to ash. Klaus kept the thought to himself. He had read enough old legends to know that it was never wise to argue with a goddess. “The secretary-general is in Cairo. They say he helped end the fighting in Sri Lanka. If the United Nations will send help—”

“Would Germany allow United Nations peacekeepers upon its soil?” Sekhmet spoke with scorn. “Why should the Caliph do what your German chancellor would not? The United Nations was a bad jest when I went to sleep, and now that I am woken I find it is a worse one. Even Sobek has more teeth than this UN.”