distance. I don't know why. In denial, I suppose.''
''In de Nile,'' David said, regretting it the instant he said it.
''That's just it!'' Zafirah exclaimed. ''That — that pathetic schoolboy humour of yours. Here I am, trying to say something serious, and you just make a joke. I don't know why I bother.''
''No, please bother.''
Somewhere inside herself she found the reserves of tolerance she needed to keep going. ''All I want is for you to understand that I know I have been difficult with you. I admit it. Standoffish. That's a real word, right? I have been that way. But I don't think I can do that any more. I don't think I want to. You confuse me, you infuriate me sometimes, but…''
That was his cue. That was a come-on line if ever David had heard one. And all at once he was reminded, acutely, how good Zafirah looked. Even with her features hemmed in by the turban and seamed with road grime, she was nothing less than striking. And the way she straddled the bike — arms folded, legs straight out in an inverted V, holding the machine upright with the clench of her thighs — was impossibly sexy. He felt a bead of sweat trickling down his torso under his shirt, working its way from collarbone to crotch.
He could reach out to her now. Should. Must. This was it. Now or never.
But then Steven's admonition flashed through his head:
Why? he asked himself as his arms remained limp by his sides and the bead of sweat was absorbed untraceably into his waistband. Why am I letting Steven dictate what I can and can't do regarding this woman?
Zafirah was watching him, waiting for him to make his move.
David felt abject. Helpless.
Seconds passed.
Zafirah turned her face away. Something in the middle distance caught her attention.
''There,'' she said coolly. ''Look. A car in trouble.''
A dinky little runabout had strayed off the hard-packed dirt track the column was following. It had driven onto the soft sand at the edges. It had become bogged down.
Zafirah lowered her goggles and stamped down on the kick-starter. David did the same. He rode after her towards the stricken car, steering his bike along the snaky double-groove her tyres left behind.
The car had to be unloaded. They dug the wheels out. It still couldn't free itself. They used planks so that it could gain traction. Finally, revving hard, the car lurched clear.
An hour's work in the blazing sunshine, David and Zafirah barely exchanging a word.
And that was how it remained with them for the rest of that day and into the next, all the way to Suez. Awkward. Strained. The air between them heavy with silence and disappointment.
Then came the Nephthysian attack. Not the naval bombardment David had predicted. Something much more insidious.
20. Mummies
The process of recycling dead troops in mass quantities had become quite industrialised. There was something of the production line about it.
First, freshly killed corpses were gathered from the battlefield and transported to a Reanimation Facility, usually to be found at a military base as part of its extensive temple complex. In the Reanimation Facility, a pyramidal building naturally, the bodies were sorted into two categories, the relatively intact and the unusable. The latter were discarded; incinerated. The former were cleansed and purified with oils, then sliced open so that certain major organs — liver, lungs, stomach, intestine — could be excised and removed. Each crop of viscera was sealed in a set of Canopic jars, the military-issue version of which was a cubic canister with four separate compartments, designed for compactness and utility.
The corpses' brains were extracted next, scraped out through the nose with hooks and destroyed. Not only was this customary, as the Ancient Egyptians had always believed that the purpose of the brain was nothing more than to provide lubrication for the sinuses, but the last thing unliving shock troops needed was the potential capacity for autonomous thought.
Up until the middle of the twentieth century, natron had been used to dry the bodies out. They were covered with the substance, a kind of salt mixture, and left for forty days while it did its work. Natron, however, was expensive to procure, as well as slow acting, so a cheaper, faster method had been devised. The bodies were hung on racks and rolled into an enormous kiln, to be fired like wet clay. Once they were desiccated, entirely without moisture, they were allowed to cool and then wrapped from head to foot in cerecloths, with an extra layer of plain linen bandage forming a tight, tidy outer casing.
The entire process took less than twenty-four hours, and could be performed by trainee acolytes or even workers drawn from the laity. For the final stage, however, a fully-fledged priest was required.
The priest prayed over the withered bodies, chanted, made animal sacrifices, invoking divine power, summoning down
Mummies could be kept in storage till needed. Then, as many as were required could be activated and sent into the field. The mummies would do their masters' bidding as long as they remained within reasonably close range of the Canopic jars, at a distance of no greater than five miles. Outside that radius they ground to a halt and became lifeless, insensible things again — true corpses — and could not be resurrected a second time.
To intercept the Lightbringer as he neared Suez, the Nephthysians deployed an entire regiment of mummies, approximately 600 undead ''units''. The intention was to sow fear and discord, and rout the Freegyptian desecrator-terrorists. The Nephthysians wished to demonstrate to the infidels what happened when you opposed those with a god on their side.
Advance scouts came back to the Lightbringer with the news. The western outskirts of Suez teemed with mummies. There were throngs of them around the town's petrochemical refineries and concrete and fertiliser plants. There were more in the desert itself. They were just standing there in rough formation, clutching the Nephthysian choice of close-combat weapon, the short sword. They were completely still, like statues. It was eerie — hundreds of bandage-swathed figures stationed out in the hot sun, waiting. Just waiting.
''The Nephs are trying to spook us,'' said the Lightbringer. ''They think that that many mummies will scare us off. We won't dare advance. Me personally, though, I'm insulted. They're sending the undead to take care of us? That's how seriously they take us, that they won't even commit living troops? If it wasn't for this mask, I'd spit on the ground.''
Troops were marshalled. Weapons were readied for an assault.
Meanwhile, David was despatched with Zafirah and several of her Liberators on a subsidiary mission.
Simple triangulation determined the likeliest location for the Canopic jars. Given the maximum five-mile range and the sheer number of mummies involved, the jars had to be on a ship, a largish one, close to shore, somewhere inside the curve of the Bay of Suez.
Sure enough, a freighter flying the Nephthysian colours lay at anchor at Port Tawfiq, a spit of land jutting out into the confluence of the canal and the Red Sea. Through binoculars David spied three priests on deck, taking the late-afternoon air. That clinched it. Battleships invariably carried a priest, sometimes two. But a merchant navy vessel? The Canopic jars were on board. The freighter was the hub of the Nephs' mummy operation.
Darkness fell. David, Zafirah and the Liberators approached along the shoreline, keeping low. The freighter loomed before them, her bulk haloed by the dockyard floodlights. She was manned — perhaps fittingly, given her
