Saeed — or it could have been Salim — handed David the remote detonator. He passed it on to Zafirah.
''You do the honours,'' he said.
''A gift,'' she replied sardonically. ''How kind.''
He didn't want her to look at him like that, so bruised, so resentful. He hated how her eyes became narrow, dimming their usual gemlike lustre. But what could he do? He kept wrestling with his conscience. He kept trying to overcome his need to please his brother by abiding by the taboo Steven had imposed on her. He kept losing.
Zafirah raised the detonator and, with an emphatic set of her jaw, pressed the button.
The explosion was muffled, like someone slamming a heavy door in a room downstairs, but the whole freighter jolted with the force of it. She rocked as though some vital organ had gone into spasm. Deep ripples eddied out from her hull. A short while later smoke appeared, seeping out from under her cargo hatches.
At much the same time the sounds of far-off combat waned. The flashes and rumbles grew further apart, then ceased.
One of the priests fixed David with a glare and began muttering.
''What's he saying?'' David asked Zafirah.
''Oh, just cursing you. Summoning the wrath of Nephthys down on your head. Calling you a heathen and a godless monkey and a follower of a false prophet.''
Had David been in a better, more even-tempered frame of mine just then, he might have shrugged it off. In the event, fury welled up. He saw himself reaching for the priest, grabbing him by the robes, knocking him to the ground, kicking him in the face as he lay there. He saw himself, and then realised he was actually doing all this. It was as though he was not the author of his own actions, he was a bystander, someone else was responsible.
He stopped then, when the truth dawned. Leaving the priest moaning and spitting out blood and teeth, he turned on his heel and strode off in a cloud of self-disgust.
At the site of the battle, jubilation reigned. Half the mummies had been felled by gunfire and grenade. The rest had collapsed abruptly, turning to heaps of bandage and powdered flesh the moment the Canopic jars had been destroyed.
''The Nephthysians thought us cowards and fools,'' the Lightbringer told his troops, who hadn't suffered a single casualty. ''They treated us with contempt. They thought all it would take to make us turn back was a few mummies. How severely they underestimated us! How wrong they were!''
The cavalcade of vehicles traversed the canal without further interruption, passing onto the Sinai Peninsula, the immense triangular tract of land that would take them to the eastern border of Arabia. David, in the back seat of the Lightbringer's car, closed his eyes and did something he hadn't done in weeks: he prayed.
He called on Osiris and Isis. He asked them to hear him. He begged for their understanding. He was looking out for his brother, that was all he was doing. He had allowed himself to become swept up in the Lightbringer's crusade but it was Steven he was helping. He wasn't a heathen. He was not. He was still a true son of the Parent Hegemony. He still had faith.
Didn't he?
For the first time in his life David felt no certainty that the Benevolent Father and the Mother of All were listening. His prayer seemed to go nowhere, sounding hollow in his head, dull and echoless. He wondered if that was the fate of all the prayers he had ever prayed. He couldn't recall a time when any of the wishes he had articulated in them had actually been granted. He'd prayed mainly because praying had made him feel better.
It didn't now. Quite the opposite.
He opened his eyes.
Heathen.
How had that happened? When? At what moment had his faith deserted him?
In the desert. When he was lost. When he had been close to death and all too acutely aware of the gods' indifference, not to mention that of his military superiors, who had thought it preferable to kill him and his men rather than leave them the possibility of escaping and surviving. When he had never felt quite so abandoned and alone.
It wasn't that he no longer believed the One True Pantheon existed. Of course it did.
He no longer believed in the Pantheon. He no longer trusted the gods, any of them, to do what was right by their worshippers.
So damn them.
Heathen he was, then.
And as such, he would stick with the Lightbringer — with Steven — to the bitter end.
21. Anubians
At dawn, not far from the border, David found Steven atop a low ridge, facing east. Behind them the encampment was coming to life, the Lightbringer's army getting ready for the push into Arabia. Ahead, the desert was lit in shades of virgin pink and baby blue. The camp was filled with clatter and bustle as meals were eaten and tents put away, but from the landscape ahead came a tremendous, primordial silence that seemed to sweep all before it, the engulfing soundlessness that must have existed at the world's beginning and would be all that remained at its end.
Steven, hearing the crunch of footfalls, twitched his head. He had been lost in contemplation of the sunrise. He turned.
''Dave,'' he said. ''Glad it's you. Don't feel up to talking to anyone else just at this moment.''
''What's the matter?'' David asked.
''Nothing,'' his brother said. He rubbed a hand back and forth over the top of his mask, as though trying to carve the white sphere of his head even smoother. ''Nothing. Just… vertigo, that's all.''
David glanced around. The ridge they were standing on was a bump in the earth, barely twenty feet high. ''This is hardly Everest.''
''Not actual vertigo, dimwit. Metaphorical. We're about to take an immense step. A step over a precipice, it feels like.''
''Doubt? You?''
''Not so much doubt. A sense of… I'd say destiny, except you'd laugh.''
''I would, too.''
''This is it, Dave. Today we make the move that'll bring the full wrath of the Nephs down on our heads. The Setics probably as well. Once we cross the Arabian border there's no going back. We go from nuisance to threat. We'll no longer be something the Nephs try to brush off, we'll be something they're duty-bound to crush.''
''But that's what you want, isn't it? That's why we've come all this way. To draw the Nephs out. To face them in open battle.''
''Absolutely. And if we can get them to confront us on the particular battleground I have in mind, then we stand every chance of winning. After all, he who chooses the battleground has half won the battle already, as some wise man once said. Probably me. If they go for us before then, though, we're pretty much buggered.''
''The way I see it, we're pretty much buggered whatever happens. We're taking on one holy power bloc, possibly two, with three-thousand-odd men and largely outmoded weaponry. Chances of outright victory? Nil, I'd say.''
''Remember your Classical Civilisation at school?'' Steven said. ''Three hundred Spartans defeated a million Persians at Thermopylae. The right tactics in the right location can work wonders.''
''As I recall, the Spartans all died.''
''But they saved Greece, and their memory lives on.''
''You're not in this for posthumous fame, though,'' David pointed out.