Inside Straight

George R. R. Martin Crusader

The shortcut is a mistake.

The road runs along the west bank, following the course of the Nile. Once chariots carved deep ruts in its surface, and priests and pharaohs and Roman legionnaires moved along it, but now it carries cars and trucks and yellow school buses. Semis belch diesel as they roar past palm trees and fields of sugar cane.

The family has neither truck nor chariot, only a pair of wire grocery carts stolen from some Cairo supermarket, piled high with clothes and toys and pots and all the rest of their worldly possessions. A small boy rides in one shopping cart, a crippled old man in the other. The mother and the father push, and from time to time the daughter lends a hand. She is twelve and already taller than her parents, a slender girl and pretty.

They have been walking for days, every day and all day, pushing the rattling carts down the two-lane road, part of the great river of refugees flowing from the delta down toward Karnak, Aswan, and Abu Simbel, stopping only at night to rest exhausted in some nearby field. All that long way they have stayed on the road, never straying far from the column. Every day Karnak is a little closer. In Karnak they will be safe, the old man promises. Their gods are strong in Karnak. Anubis will open the way for them, Horus and Sobek and Taweret will defend them. There will be food for everyone, beds to sleep in, shelter from the sun—but only when they reach the temple, the glorious New Temple.

The talk along the road is that Karnak lies no more than a day and a half ahead, as the ibis flies, but the road follows the river, so when the Nile loops east the road loops as well. That is when the whisper goes up and down the ragged column, passed from mouth to mouth. There is a quicker way, a shorter way, just leave the road and cut due south, and you’ll shave twenty kilometers off your journey. Twenty kilometers is nothing for a man in a car, but for a family pushing two old shopping carts it is a long way. The daughter’s feet are blistered, the little boy is sunburned, and the father’s back aches more with every step. Small wonder that they leave the road to take the shortcut.

Since the dawn of time, Egypt has been two nations, the black lands and the red. The black lands along the Nile are rich, wet, fertile, and well peopled. The red lands beyond are harsher, a sere and savage wilderness of sand and stone and scorpions baking beneath the merciless Egyptian sun.

That is where the jackals find them.

Far from the road, they sweep down upon the family as they cross a fissured plain of red stone and hard-packed sand. One has a rifle, the other two long knives. One rides a red horse, one a black, and one a dun. All wear the green-and-black keffiyeh of Ikhlas al-Din. They are lean men, black of hair and eye, with short beards and sun-browned skin. To western eyes they are indistinguishable from those they hunt, but they know the red lands as the family from Cairo does not. They know the red lands as only a jackal can, and like jackals, they sniff behind the herd, waiting to descend on stragglers.

There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no one to hear a cry for help. The mother wraps thin arms about her daughter, and the old man begins to pray. He prays to Set and Sobek, to Hathor and Horus, to Anubis and Osiris, prays in the same Arabic tongue the riders speak. Yet, when they hear his prayer, it whips them to a fury. “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet,” one cries. He springs from his horse, kicks over one of the family’s shopping carts, and slashes the old man across the face, opening his cheek to the bone. The praying stops. There is no sound but for the faint buzzing of a wasp, and the soft patter of blood falling on sand baked hard as brick.

The riders dismount. The daughter, brave and pretty, pleads with them. In Cairo they have many Muslim friends, she says. They have never done any harm to the people of Islam. The jackal with the rifle answers her. “You bow down to monsters accursed of Allah, and our Caliph’s holy blood is on your hands.” He swats at an insect buzzing round his head, a wasp that glimmers in the sun like an emerald with wings. “You would steal our lands from us, you and your demon gods. You think we do not see? We see. This is where you die. The sands will drink your joker blood.”

The wasp stings him in the neck.

Cursing, he swats at it, but the insect is too quick. It lands upon the rump of the nearest horse, and stings again. The horse rears up kicking. A second wasp appears. They fly around the jackals, darting in and out, landing on one man’s nose, another’s arm, stinging. One of the riders catches a wasp in his hand and crushes it between his fingers. He wipes the remains off on his pants leg, grinning. Only then does he hear the motorbike.