“We should go back to the ship,” Donnchadh whispered to him. “I can cure you there.”
Gwalcmai laughed, the sound more a rasp coming through his tortured throat. “I can’t make it. If the fever breaks, then yes. We go. But—” He tried to get up, but his muscles had no energy. He collapsed back on the cot, soaked in sweat. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Donnchadh said. She wrapped her arms around her partner. Across the chamber, Dag-Brynn was watching.
“I could help you take him wherever you need to go. To your ship.”
Donnchadh sadly shook her head. “No. It’s all right.”
Dag-Brynn came over and looked down. “The village across the way. Many died twenty years ago. Something killed them all. They had the chill and the fever. I had to send my family away. Many miles away. My wife and daughter died.”
Donnchadh had assumed her partner had caught a cold from swimming in the water, but now she had to wonder— had someone poisoned the lake? But what could last in the water that long? During the Revolution, the Airlia had not hesitated to use biological weapons against the humans. Millions had died as a result.
It didn’t matter. She could not take Dag-Brynn to the Fynbar . And in this condition she could not get Gwalcmaithere on her own. The trip would surely kill him. His only chance was to ride this out here.
She sat next to Gwalcmai for hours. Sometime in the middle of the night he began raving in their native tongue, causing Dag-Brynn to cast some curious glances their way. Donnchadh put cold compresses on her partner’s forehead, trying to keep the temperature down. She tried to rehydrate him with a broth using the deer and springwater.
None of it worked.
Just before dawn, Gwalcmai sat bolt upright and called out their son’s name. Then he slumped back, the life fading from his eyes.
Donnchadh reached up and carefully closed her husband’s eyelids. She bowed her head for several moments, then reached inside his tunic and removed his ka.
“I am very sorry.” Dag-Brynn was standing just behind her.
“Will you help me bury him?”
“Of course. Where?”
“On the top of the tor,” Donnchadh said. “His spirit can help guard this place.”
They were at sea for four days before Gwalcmai finally asked their destination.
“Giza.”
Gwalcmai nodded. “I expected as much.” The trading ship they were on was hugging the coast of Europe, moving around it toward the Mediterranean. He was quiet for a few minutes, then asked: “And when we get there?”
“I have been thinking,” Donnchadh said. Since traveling back to their ship and implanting Gwalcmai’s memories and personality in the ka into the body in stasis, she had been considering their next move. Since Gwalcmai had no memories of the most recent trip to Avalon, and she had been the one to read the scrolls, she had taken full responsibility for planning their next actions. Which, of course, was pretty much the norm for them since they had been together.
Gwalcmai waited quietly, something he was not good at. His unusual silence grated on her. They normally regenerated at the same time. She found that there was a certain indefinable distance between them ever since leaving the ship. Her current body was young, only the equivalent of late twenties, but Gwalcmai appeared to have just passed the threshold into manhood.
“Things here are not the same as they were on our world,” she finally said. “We have made the situation different. The Great Civil War has made everything very different.”
Gwalcmai barely nodded, indicating his agreement.
“Both sides sleep,” Donnchadh continued, “and have their minions skirmishing. The key for the Master Guardian is under our control. Their headquarters on this planet at Atlantis is gone. Their communications array on Mars is destroyed and they are out of contact with their empire. All these are things we had to do at great cost early in our war against the Airlia on our planet.”
Gwalcmai nodded once more. “We took out the communications array first. That cost us many good God-killers. And it was only the first stage of the war.”
Donnchadh stayed quiet, staring over the wooden railing at the shoreline passing by.
“So.” Gwalcmai finally spoke. “You are saying the war has progressed far already, even though these humans are not even close to being able to challenge the Airlia with their technology.”
“Yes.”
Gwalcmai rubbed the stubble of beard on his chin. “It is still too soon.”
“Not if—” Donnchadh began, but then fell silent.
“Not if what?”
She pulled out the scepter they had brought with them to the planet so many years ago. “Not if we procure the Grail and use it. Create an army of immortals.”
Gwalcmai did not immediately object, which she found interesting. But after several minutes of mulling it over, he shook his head. “It still would not work. We do not have the weaponry to challenge the Airlia. We may make an army of immortals, but all it will bring about is great suffering for those transformed. They will die and come back to life constantly. A terrible fate. And the immortality has conditions — we learned how to kill the Airlia and I am certain they will know how to kill our immortals.” Gwalcmai paused. “But — I do think it would be wise for us to try to get the Grail under our control, as we have had Excalibur removed from Giza. It will prevent the Airlia from using it on their minions.”
“That is what I have been thinking.”
“And that is all,” Gwalcmai said, “under our control.”
“All right.”
Gwalcmai smiled. “Why do I not believe you?”
Slavery among humans. Humans owning other humans like property. It was a concept strange to Donnchadh and Gwalcmai. Their planet had been under the thrall of the Airlia for so long that the concept of humans “owning” other humans had never even arisen. But Egypt had changed since last they visited. The Great Pyramid still sat atop the Giza Plateau, but the sides were rough and worn from the weather. There were two more large pyramids flanking it, obviously attempts by other Pharaohs to match the splendor that Khufu had built. The Black Sphinx was hidden out of sight,the depression it sat in covered and camouflaged as part of the plateau itself, and there was a stone replica squatting on top.
The physical changes were great, but what truly struck both Donnchadh and Gwalcmai was the sprawling camp of slaves to the south of the Giza Plateau. There were thousands living there, under the thrall of guards and forced to do all the hard labor, from making bricks to the fine craftsmanship needed to finish the numerous temples and palaces being built. The camp was surrounded by a mud-brick wall six feet high with guard towers spaced every hundred meters. The wall seemed more a symbolic barrier than an actual one, as the people held inside seemed broken by their situation.
The slaves were not Egyptians. They were a mixture of races, predominant among them a conquered tribe called Judeans. They came from a land to the north and east, along the shores of the Mediterranean. They had been defeated by the Egyptians in battle and brought here in chains to do hard labor.
Donnchadh and Gwalcmai found the Watcher of Giza in the same small stone hut in which all his predecessors had also lived. He was a middle-aged man who, while he knew his role, had not sent in a single report to Avalon in all his years at the post. He was frightened by their appearance and fell on his knees when Donnchadh showed him the golden medallion, begging her not to slay him. Realizing he would be of little aid, the two made their own forays onto Giza and the nearby towns, learning as much as they could.