Thanks for the reviews everyone!

And I know that I'm taking some extreme liberties in the chapter, so forgive me.


Like flesh on fire, scraped from waxen bones to reveal lips so red they dripped their color over cold and sandy finger nails, the sun set. It set like flowers and like virgins and like a veil ascending over a moon-white face. Ardeth saw the sunset different every night. It was the only thing that ever changed to him, the only thing that was not a constant. Until today.

The creature Boann was gracefully sweating teardrops over the fire into the large black pot the tribe had supplied her. Instead of ground meal and bread, as they would have prepared, the woman had offered to make a stew, which would keep better when cold. Drostan had explained that this would normally be made with potatoes, but worked just as well with oats and rice. The three men Ardeth had brought with him were surprisingly compliant – he wondered if she had them spooked. Or else it was simply because she was using her own water, and not theirs.

He was watching her as she worked. She had rolled up her sleeves to reveal taught arms. A total of three tattoos littered her wrists and forearms, all in black. Two were solely decorative, the other had a sample of text with it. She had also let loose part of her hair from her veil, which was tied up over and under her veil. She could capsize under that amount of hair, he thought.

When the meal was finished, Ardeth, his men and the O'Connell's found it rather delicious. A good waste of water, he thought.

"Where'd you learn to make this," Evie asked politely.

"Back in Ireland," Drostan replied for Boann. "I 'member Boann's ma making it when I was wee, and... I think... Ann didn't Brady make it, as well?"

"No. Da's wife made it a few times, though." Boann's voice was unwavering, but her eyes were losing their convexity again,

"Right. Anyways, like I said, keeps well." Drostan finished with a bite.

"How long did the two of you live in Ireland?" Ardeth asked.

Drostan swallowed, "Um... before Kell died, er... Boann's ma, I mean... where was I... before Kell died, we'd lived their only about uh... two years? Well, two for me, 'cause I was only two. That makes five for Boann. Then we moved back for about eight years."

"Seven years." Boann corrected him.

"Oh, seven, right."

"Were you their during the war at all?" Rick asked. Ardeth had a vague idea of what he might be talking about.

"Em... yes, but we got out before it became 'Civil'" Drostan responded. Boann had eaten about three bites, and said an equivalent amount of words, yet she excused herself lowly, set down her bowl and walked away from the fire after chatting something to Drostan in a tongue Ardeth did not understand. Ardeth felt a twitch to stand, but Drostan signaled him down. As she left, though, Ardeth saw the twinkle of a beaded chain around her belt, next to what he assumed was a sack of bullets. He would later conclude that it was indeed a rosary.

"Annie's not too people-ly, if you know what I mean."

"We've noticed," said Adil in thick English.

Evie deliberated visibly. She was struggling with a question, or a statement, and Rick noticed this. Not to be as polite as his wife, he prepared to say what he knew she was cooking to say.

"Well, you'd be too if you were... her."

It was Drostan who spoke before Rick could even ask.

"And what is it about her?" Rick asked.

Drostan was hesitantly preparing to speak words that seemed to hold an immense amount of poignancy even before they were spoken.

"Ann's face..." Drostan's mouth pinched in what looked to be a great amount of pain at having to force the muscles to speak. "...she lost an eye."

The group was slightly taken aback. Ardeth not as much, having already tossed these ideas within his head. Instead, he pressed on, much to Evelyn's shock.

"Blind, or completely absent?"

"Ardeth!" Evie was appalled by Ardeth's questioning, and Rick was not entirely sure what to make of it either, but Drostan was an easy talker.

"Oh, all-the-way gone. Actually, we always wondered iffin a few pieces of it had stuck under the scar flesh. No way to really find out I guess." A few pieces... Cut out of her socket, and Ardeth was able to visualize it. The gelatinous humors seeping at the puncture of the bulb – slowly though, not quickly, mixing like batter with the blood and flesh by the hand of a very careful cook. He could picture it in terrible detail.

"Good God, that's so awful."

At Evie's concern, Drostan began to giggle. Then laugh. Then cackle rather hysterically.

"Mmmm, not that awful love. Not too awful." He said through his laughter. At that he took another sickeningly large spoonful of the stew into his mouth, and swallowed with a watery sound.


The four Medjai had set up two small tents, one for Evie and Rick, the other for Boann and Drostan. The Medjai would take turns keeping watch. There was still another two days at least after this, and Ardeth's one concern was getting the O'Connell's there alive.

Alright, not his one concern, perhaps. One of his concerns. The other being Boann, of course. While the O'Connell's had gone to bed, and Drostan had fallen out with yet another bottle of liquor at his chest just outside of his tent, Boann was sitting at the edge of their encampment, with her horse, taking advantage of the cool cool night to smoke a finely rolled cigarette.

Ardeth sat by the failing embers a while, simply staring at her. He knew that she knew he was looking, he could read it in her shoulders. They were thickly laden with cloth and robes, and he wondered what they looked like. Were they frail, or strong? Did her clavicle curve far out into them, or was it hidden behind muscle or a secret supply of fat? Did she roll one and then the other out of nervousness, or was that some sort of threat that he felt in her movement?

Threat, or pity. Here is a woman robbed of a face, he thought. She was cycloptic, rendered unattractive for the rest of her life. To him, this was a terrible fate. A woman has it hard enough in the world, to have to be left without the one thing that would have been on her side.

He wondered how it happened. How did this skinny little white thing aggravate a knife into her eye socket.

Before he knew it, he was sitting beside her, walking carefully across the sand to her and her horse. He sat gently beside her. As he had neared, it became apparent that she had relinquished her veil in the almost-privacy of the night and her cigarette. As he sat down, he saw the black strip of frayed cloth that spun around her skull and over the mass or flesh. As she brought the cigarette to her lips, by the light of her inhalation he saw a few solitary scars dance in the shadows down her cheeks, like the razor-trails of acid tears that had once fallen from her right eye.

She was silent for several minutes. Her shoulders were tense, but Ardeth was not. He relaxed himself the best he could, taking in the even more unappealing picture that the symmetry of her face painted.

"What's his name, your horse, Boann?"

Boann did not look at him. She exhaled the hot smoke, the smell and texture and heat of which comforted him in the cold desert night.

"It's a she."

"Sorry. What is her name?"

"... Ciannait."

"That's an odd name." Boann said nothing to this. She simply took another drag, as the horse snorted with a disapproving laugh.

"What does it mean?"

"It means 'ancient' in Gaelic." She said, now in English. Ardeth suspected the next morning that it was because there was no Arabic word for "Gaelic," that she knew of. He responded in English:

"Where did you find it?"

"It was my mother's. When we first came to Egypt, she bought it for next-to-nothing. When I returned seven years later, I found and bought it again."

Ardeth was amazed. "It must be over twenty years old then! It's impossible that ths is the same horse."

Boann gave him a side-long glance, and the splinter of her cornea against the glow of her eye was enough to show him the possibility. He changed the subject.

"Does you're name mean anything?"

"Not in the same way," she said. She looked at him then face on, her one marble eye falling on his face like a bird's beak to his eyes. One liquorice curl tickled her brow in a slightly glamorous way.

"Then in what way?" He asked.

"Boann can mean 'she of the white cattle,' but it depends which story. She was a goddess of fertility and of cows. I'm named after a pregnant cow, mhm, you can laugh at that if you like."

Ardeth did chuckle. Her invitation was out of good humor, he could tell. She continued:

"Another story is that she released the river Boyne in Ireland from the Well of Segais, the well of knowledge. Her bloke was s'possed to protect it, and she snuck out and busted it, somehow. I don't 'member. A bit like Eve let out the tree, 'cause it let out knowledge and inspiration to the world."

"That's beautiful," Ardeth responded, although he knew it was not supposed to be.

"Yeah. Then the third part is that she had an affair with the Father god Dagda, and bore the son Angus, I think. He has another name or something." She twirled her hand and the cigarette smoke made lattices in the sky.

"But I thought you said she was married?"

"Aye, she is. This is my favorite part: because her husband, Nechtan was jealous, and not on good terms with Dagda, having lost the Well already, Dagda held up the sun," and she took her boney hand and cupped the moon in the sky instead. "He held up the sun for nine months, so that her pregnancy only lasted one day, and she could bear her child for him without being killed."

Ardeth was staring at her now dropped hand. Give her a few drinks and some trust, and she could take you places with a story, he thought.

"What 'bout you're name? What does it mean?"

"'Able one'. Terribly unexciting, eh?" He said with a small smile.

"It seems true enough."

"Oh, that it is, just ask any woman in my tribe," he said this with a strait face, of course, before spreading it to a buttery smile.

Boann chuckled quietly; a soft victory for Ardeth. Upon resuming her composure, Ardeth decided to give her that she had a nice smile.

"Well, you were certainly named for the position. Saving Egypt and all."

"Oh, and the world, too."

"Heh, aye, the world, too."

Ardeth smiled proudly. "Ability is the most important part of the job, I believe."

"Job?"

"Protection."

"I didn't realize it was a 'job'."

"Of course it is."

"Then let me ask you this..." Boann turned her entire body to face him. Her shoulders square and her spine strait. "How many have you killed in that protection?"

"... I don't know."

"You do no count?"

"Of course not."

"I've always wondered if the desert tribes counted."

"Well we do not." Ardeth found his voice harsh as it escaped his lips and touched her face. Out of vengeance and out of offense and out of unbearable desire he then asked, "Do you count yours?" He was unable to keep his alternate pronunciation of "count" from slipping.

Boann laughed at that. A thick laugh sewn with smoke. "Yes, actually, I do."

Ardeth was unsure of what to say to that. He fell silent for several moments, collecting his thoughts. He began, in a nicer tone, to change the subject.

"Why did your mother bring you to Egypt in the first place?"

"She wanted to get away from Ireland, I think. Bad people and bad memories. My da was a ...'bad people'. She was always doing crazy things like, well, running off to Egypt, f'example. She was pretty crazy. Free spirit, or whatever. But of course, Egypt was not the opp'site image she had wanted. She ended up with the same sort of husband in the same sort of position in society. Except now she was a Muslim, and I suppose she had a slightly greater amount of freedom. Enough to go out and get... get out."

"She converted? From... Christianity?"

"Catholicism."

"Oh... I thought the Irish were Protestants."

Boann gave a wry laugh. "Some of us are, like the English. That's actually what's happening right now. A war between the two. I am Catholic, from the South."

"The war's between the North and the South? I'm sorry, I have fallen out of European conflicts over the past year."

"Understandable, that is. Aye, right now it's 'tween Irishmen, but when we were there it was against the North and the British. Ye see, Catholics were being treated like shit, and like America and them, we wanted out of England."

"It must have been hard living in that."

"Yeah, well, apparently it's even harder now. People getting gunned and blown apart and shot up everywhere. I guess it was a bit like that before, but we were at least able to pretend that we weren't shooting our own people."

"We? I didn't take you for a patriot."

"You prolly din take me for a soldier either." She said humorlessly.

"Soldier?"

"Aye. I make a good lookin' boy."

Ardeth felt a piece fall into place. She was a trained warrior for an army of rebels. She gave proof with the one tattoo on her arm that was partly textual. Apparently it was one of two she recieved in the service. "Why on earth would you dress yourself as a man and join a revolution?"

"I dunno. Why do you dress yourself as a woman and join a band of ancient mummy-fighters?"

Ardeth gazed downwards at his dress-like garb, then back at Boann with a wide smile. She was returning that smile through the match that was lighting the cigarette she had just finished rolling.

"I joined because... I just did."

"Why did you leave, then? You left before the Civil War broke out, why?"

"We left nine years ago because... I couldn't really do it. I was trained, and sent out. We were trained as Guerillas, they called it. Guerilla war, where you attack and then fall back. Well, I attacked and fell back with a small bomb. It was my first assignment."

Ardeth watched as Boann swallowed hard. She took a long drag of her cigarette and shot out the smoke as if her mouth were a caliber weapon.

"I was to bomb a building, it was housing English soldiers and Northerners. Maybe a few civilians. I watched it go, you know, to make sure it worked. I had to make sure that it worked, right? And, it did. And I saw... bricks and glass, ripped from the inside out, mixing with blood and bodies. I saw, faces tearing with fire and metal and, sights lost among the... crash of one small ball of powder. A building ripped apart... Drostan and I left the next month."

Boann flicked a bit of ash onto her leg. It singed the thin top fabric, and then rested there until the wind blew it, bit by bit, away.

Ardeth was astonished by what she had just explained. He realized that he was inside, he was inside of her now and no mummy, no duty could scare him as much as that fact.

He was carefully crafting his next words when she, abruptly, asked, "Did you always want to be the chief? I mean, is it passed down from your da or..."

"Oh, um, yes." Ardeth's voice was a bit viscous for the recent un-use. "It's hereditary, but... no. No I didn't always want to be the chief. Neither did my father, though." Ardeth gave a small smile as he realized he was going to continue with the story.

"My father was born to the title, but he gave it up. He was a bit of a rebel, you see. Very uh... badass, is that right?"

Boann grinned and nodded.

"Right. He was a badass, and he refused his title, not wanted to conform to the old and, uh, 'repressive' ways of his father. Of course, this was after he had born me of his third wife. Very consistent, he was.

"So, when my grandfather died and I was about... six or seven, my father was granted his wish, and was refused the title of chieftain. It was given to his younger brother. After the... culmination of his choice was visceral, he saw that, in his heart, he did want to be his father. I think he was just... afraid to want that."

"That's very understandable... what I understood of it was," Boann said quietly. Ardeth looked at her to find that she was looking at him intently through a forest of thick, dry smelling mist.

"Understandable or not, he hated himself for it. Made my life a living hell, and my mother's..." Ardeth paused... "My stepmother's, sorry." He then continued.

"So I left when I was seventeen. I was given a scholarship in England to attend medical school at Oxford. They were attempting to create some diversity with the growing racism and independence movements happening here, in Africa. I was one of very, very few. It was a hard seven years of my life there."

"Seven years in school?"

"Yes. Nothing to the years you have to spend before that, right?"

"... Right, right." Boann said this a bit quickly, but Ardeth was too busy finding his next words to notice.

"But I worked very hard to become a doctor. I was not afraid to want to be like my father because I truly didn't want to be my father. Then... I left, in my second to last year I left and that same year my uncle died."

"You're father was next in line for the chieftain."

"Yes. But I fought him for it."

"What?"

"I fought him for the position, and won. I became chief over him. I am chief of all of my people, and he is still alive to see it."

Boann was silent for a moment. Her eye had become softer now, a bit sad, almost. Her shoulders were relaxed, pushed down by the hands of his words. Her next words surprised him.

"You're mother... she did not live to see it." It was not a question.

"No. She died."

"How?"

"... By dying."

"How did she die?"

"Childbirth," he finally said. His voice was loud and coarse now. Boann's smoke-worn words were scrapping against his brain and heart like fingernails. "She was thirteen fucking years old and her..." He was exhausted by the words. And Boann was still staring at him. He wanted to tear out her other eye at that one moment. He was furious at her, so furious.

"Her pelvis cracked," Boann finished for him. Ardeth was too angry to think about how she knew that. And Boann was too hurt to realize that she had said it.

"How did your bloody mother die?" Boann was silent at the question. She looked away, and flicked off the growing column of ash from her cigarette. Ciannait grunted in the background, and kicked one foot several times against the sand, creating even more dust around the one-eyed woman.

"That, love, doesn't matter." Ardeth began to say something along the lines of an argument, but was honestly too tired.

"You know, I think you did want to be like your father. You were afraid to want that, just like he was."

If she were right, Ardeth thought, than I could hit her right now and shut her up. But she was right... not that he would hit her, like his father might, but that he did want, somewhere in him, to be like his father. That was partly why he came back, yes. Partly...

He didn't respond, though. He was afraid his words would be irrational, and that he would regret them. They were silent for a few minutes, before he spoke again, inquiring to the time she spent in Egypt on her own.

"Well, I was seven, and Drostan was six, and an old Egyptian woman took us in. She lived on our floor in Cairo, and was the only one to respond to Drostan's incessant crying for Kell, my ma..."

"And how did Drostan come to live with your mother instead of his?"

"His mother, my da's sister, died. Consumption. And don't interrupt me."

"Yes ma'am."

"As I was saying," but Boann couldn't help but smile at Ardeth's devil-grin. "This woman took us in. She was a house cleaner, and money was... well, I didn't see an actual piece of Egyptian money until I came back about fourteen years later. Then, um..." Boann then, for the first time, acknowledged the dark side of her face. What she meant, he knew. Then, whatever happened, happened. "So, she sent us off, not caring where. I guess there's only so much a woman can take. We lived with my da in Ireland after that. Then, the war, we came back here, I was twenty-one and, well, I was able."

"Yes." Was all Ardeth said.

"Drostan..." She glanced at the sleeping buffoon, clutching his liquor like a doll. "He's not much of a person, but he's the only family I've ever really had. I suppose I am, to him, as well."

"Even if you are a bit hard on him?"

"Heh, even if."

Ardeth laughed lightly. He had felt the need to ask about her father, but felt that she might flatten out again. Make some Cryptic statement and then shut up. He didn't want her to shut up, so he didn't.

"Why did you kill that man, today. The one who had been shot in the head?" Boann asked this out of seemingly no where.

"Euthanasia is a practice among us. That man's brain had been partially destroyed."

"Partially?"

"Yes. His pons was still functioning." Ardeth spoke again more gently now, speaking of something that got his passions off of her one staring eye. "The pons is the part of the brain, here, in the back," and he demonstrated by placing his clawed hand on the back of Boann's neck, gently snapping a curl with a jagged fingernail and he brought it away. She did not flinch, yet her back seemed tense as any rock. "It is the part that keeps your primary functions going... um, the stuff that keeps your heart beating, your lungs working. So it can function without the rest. He could not see, hear or think, yet he was still alive. He would have bled to death, but, we believe in the mercy of quick death."

Boann gave a soft smile, "That's nice. I like that. I didn't know your brain had different parts."

"Oh, it has dozens. All with a different function." He then touched his hand to one part of her skull, digging his fingers in her thick, sandy curls to touch her pale pale flesh. "This is for speech. And this part, here, part of it is for abstract thought. And this is for seeing," he touched part of her forehead and let his fingertips linger. They were callous and stiff with sand. Boann didn't pull away though. He realized that she wasn't enjoying the contact, though. She was concentrating on the last section he had pointed to.

Ardeth quickly pulled his hand away. Embarrassed, he said, "I... have a book on it, actually. Well, it's a book on all of it, if you'd like to read it."

"I can't read."

Ardeth's face flinched. He was digging this hole very, very deep. "Sorry, I didn't know, I should have..."

"Assumed?" She caught him before he could save himself from digging another few feet.

"Yes, assumed."

At this, Boann gave him a blank look. Ardeth apologized, but it as no use. She was clamming up again. Saying only a few words at a time. He soon gave up, his shift was nearing and he would have to start the surveillance of the camp, relieving one of his men. He excused himself, and crossed to the other side of the camp. He watched as she turned her face profile to the direction he had walked in, looking after his tread. She then gave a deep sigh, through her back and shoulders, and stood up. She dusted herself off, pulled from her saddlebag another robe, and lay down beside Ciannait's feet. Then, to Ardeth's astonishment, the horse began to kneel. As she began to close onto the ground, Ardeth felt his feet begin to move under him. The horse was certainly going to crush Boann when it lay completely.

But it didn't. Ardeth stopped mid step as he watched the horse, with miraculous balance, lay perfectly next to it's sleeping master, it's body most likely keeping her warmer than ever. The last of her cigarette smoke drifted into the wind, and she threw the butt off into the sand, and then took the string of beads from her belt. At the conclusion of her prayer, which seemed to take a good fifteen minutes, she drifted off with a shudder of her shoulders.

Ardeth didn't know what to do. He had just met a woman, maimed, mean, and in some strange way, beautifully composed. Tragically so, but a beautiful tragedy. One he felt akin to. The only thing that was really driving him mad, was the way she looked at him. He could stand the meanness, the manliness the toughness. But that look, as if she could see the images within his head. As if she could tell him his own story better than he. He hated it. He spent the rest of the night figure out how to condition himself to somehow love it as much as the rest.