V. "My City"

There were nine of them ranked before the throne. Nine black-skinned Nubian warriors, all bearing short swords and wicked-looking daggers. All clad in the scarlet attire of the red guard. Nubian eyes will be watching you, Balthazar had said upon their parting.

He never was one for subtlety, Mathayus growled to himself.

The nine genuflected as one, vowing loyalty to their new king. Then their captain rose and said, "We are a gift of trust to the Scorpion King, from his friend and brother in the south. With us, we bring one of such great and magnificent courage that he will be sung of in legends for generations to come."

The king glanced questioningly at his sorceress.

Cassandra's lips were twitching as if she were trying to hold back a laugh. The guard captain, too, seemed to be suppressing a grin.

Mathayus wondered silently why everyone seemed to know something he didn't. And then a sun-browned face peered between two red-draped shoulders, and a mischievous grin lit up beneath that impossible tangle of hair.

"Menes!" the king exclaimed. The boy who had stolen twenty blood rubies from the future king flew up the steps to the throne with characteristic disregard for propriety. For once eye to eye with Mathayus, Menes planted hands on hips and examined the new king. "Well?" Mathayus asked with a smile.

The boy grinned again. "You really are king!" Then he poked the ruby set in his friend's golden pectoral.

Mathayus raised an eyebrow at Menes. "You don't get to steal this one."

* * *

They'd ensconced Menes in a bedchamber adjacent to their own. Mathayus listened to Cassandra telling the boy a bedtime story about a fox carrying a scorpion across a river. "And when the scorpion stung the fox, the fox asked, 'Why did you sting me?' To which the scorpion replied, 'I'm sorry, friend, but it's my nature.'"

Mathayus listened to her soothing voice and realized that the sorceress would never agree to bear children. She would never want to pass on her dreadful burden to another generation.

He fell asleep thinking about the boy he'd accidentally slain, and the boy now lying in the next room.

He stood in the Valley of the Dead, close to the gates of the city. Though only a few months had passed since its construction had begun, the necropolis was impossibly complete. Stark against the summer sky and aligned with the sacred cardinal points, four granite obelisks guarded the walls. The gleaming inner temple was surrounded by houses and workshops and shrines that would lie forever empty.

Vacant, but for the wind, the sand, and the spirits of the dead.

Something drew his gaze to the western horizon, and suddenly he was there on a bluff, overlooking the necropolis, and he knew this was a dream. Before him stood a strange fetish--a lion had been slain and flayed; its headless pelt hung tail up, like a gruesome banner, from a pole planted upright in a golden urn.

An eerily musical yipping turned Mathayus' head. Behind him and all around him capered a pack of black dogs--no, jackals--trotting and lying down, rolling in the dust and greeting each other with snarls. All with lantern-orange eyes. The hair on the nape of his neck pricked, and Mathayus turned back to find the fetish gone.

Jesup waited there in its place. Mathayus felt the sands shifting under his feet. He looked down to see grass and grain springing to life from the dead earth all around him, turning the whole valley green and lush in a matter of moments. "My city," the dead Akkadian said. Over his shoulder, the first stars of the evening glittered over the valley.

Then the sky shifted to day, then back to night, and the earth began hissing like disturbed asps. Light flickered to dark flickered to light, and time began to devour the limestone of the necropolis. The pack behind Mathayus barked and laughed, and he spun around, suddenly furious. But instead of the wild dogs, he met a jackal-headed man.

"Anubis..."

The deity bared spittle-slick canines in a mocking grin. When he spoke, his voice was a low and feral growl.

"My city," the god of the dead said.

* * *

"Did you know there's a giant scarab in the sky?"

Menes sat at a table in Philos' cluttered shop, hunched over a small pile of wood shavings and bits of cloth and string he'd salvaged from the old man's trash heap.

Philos looked up from his examination of the boy's work, gazing through odd glass lenses that made him look like he had the eyes of a frog. "Good heavens!"

"It pushes the ball of the sun across the sky all day, from morning to night."

"Who's been filling your head with such nonsense?"

Menes shrugged. "Everybody says so." He fiddled silently with the cloth and wood for a moment. "Did you know the sun is really the eye of Horus?"

The old man's beard bristled. "Now look here! If I were a god, I certainly wouldn't want some dung beetle shoving my eyeball around all day." He blinked his big frog eyes, and Menes tried not to giggle. "Religion, my boy, is just people trying to figure out things they're not smart enough to understand." He paused, then added, "Yet."

Menes balanced three sticks together carefully and fastened a bit of cloth over them. "Did you know King Mathayus talks to Anubis in his sleep?" Ignoring Philos' continued stare, he finished his tiny sculpture of King Balthazar's encampment. Then, with a grin and a whoop, he blew it all down.