being so careless and rice wine for being so beguilingly potent. He continued the uphill journey bent double, sometimes on hands and knees. He planned on crawling into his little camp bed before anyone saw him and catching a few hours' sleep. If war came today, he'd be in no fit state to face it without some shuteye beforehand.
Gaining the summit, he looked around. Sunrise was still several minutes away. Everything was grey and bleary. He could see his little bivouac, perched with several others among the rubble of shattered, ancient houses. Not far. A few hundred paces.
He blinked, and the sun was nearly up, and his bivouac was still a few hundred paces away. He stood up on the spot where he had briefly passed out. He tottered forwards. Then he passed out again.
He half-opened his eyes, hearing voices. He was lying on his side, cheek in the dust. Two people were talking softly nearby, a man and a woman, in Arabic. Dimly David knew that he knew both voices. They were so familiar, it seemed absurd to him that he couldn't for the moment identify them. There was a time lag between what he was thinking and what he wanted to think.
Steven. And… Zafirah?
He tried to stand, so that he could see them. Standing, however, had become a skill as hard to master as juggling. The best he could manage was hauling himself up onto all fours, from which position he was able to peer over the top of an old stone rain-cistern.
His brother and Zafirah weren't as close by as he'd thought. They were at the entrance to the command post, perhaps 200 yards from where he was crouching. In the dawn stillness their voices, though low, carried far.
He couldn't make out their words, and anyway his Arabic wasn't up to translating. He focused on their body language. What did it tell him? Might it reveal what Zafirah was doing up here, talking to the Lightbringer at this hour?
Zafirah looked perplexed, to him. Her usual swagger was gone. There was a hapless hunch to her shoulders. Afraid? Maybe. Almost everyone in the Lightbringer's army was tense, anxious, and understandably so. Attack was imminent. But somehow he didn't feel Zafirah belonged in that category. This was a fight she'd long been spoiling for, and if she harboured any fears, she was the type to keep them to herself.
What, then? What was the reason for the stooped stance, the one foot toeing the other, the hands that didn't seem to know where to put themselves?
And Steven. He was looking concerned. Conciliatory. His head was canted to one side. The patient listener. The man who cared.
Then something he said made Zafirah wheel away abruptly. He caught her by the arm. He turned her back round. His head bent to hers and his voice dropped to an inaudible whisper.
David watched as Zafirah leaned in with her ear close to Steven's mask-veiled mouth — intimately close. He watched as Steven murmured to her, still holding her. He watched her body start to unstiffen. She relaxed. He thought, although he was too far away to be sure, that she even smiled.
And now he thought, or imagined he thought, that Steven's hand was caressing Zafirah's hair.
And now he imagined, or thought he imagined, that Zafirah was pressing her cheek against Steven's face. Had the mask not been there, this would have been a kiss. A lingering touch of lips to cheek. Even with the mask it was still a kiss, of sorts.
Then Zafirah was walking away, confidence restored. She strode straight past David's place of concealment. She didn't see him. He didn't make his presence known. She disappeared down the footpath. Steven turned and ducked in through the command post entrance.
David slumped to the ground, his sake-soused brain struggling to digest what he had just witnessed. It couldn't have been what it had appeared to be, and yet it couldn't have been anything else. Steven and Zafirah in a clinch. Well, not quite a clinch, but as near as made no difference. An embrace too close to be that of just-friends. She had been unsure about something, and Steven had soothed her, as tenderly as a lover would, and they had parted with a kiss.
And where had the pair of them been immediately before that conversation? Indoors? In the command post? Alone together? Was that why Zafirah had needed soothing? To set her mind at ease over something that had happened in there? Something they had done?
It was all leading to one conclusion. David kept trying to reinterpret the evidence, direct it onto a more innocent track. Again and again it steered itself inexorably back towards that same conclusion.
His head swam. The rim of the sun crested the horizon, Ra on the rise. He wanted to get up, go and confront his brother. His eyelids were as heavy as old sash windows. The hard earth felt extraordinarily comfortable beneath him, soft as a feather bed. Steven, the liar. Steven, the traitor. The dawn sky was red. Blood of Apophis, shed by Set. Just a few minutes' rest. Steven, the devious, selfish bastard. Fucked her. Fucker.
''Fkrrr,'' David mumbled, and lapsed into unconsciousness.
And came awake to the scream of jets and the crackle of explosions. A Nephthysian Locust passed a couple of hundred of feet overhead, its roar making the whole of Mount Megiddo tremble. Cluster bombs tumbled from its wings. Rippling patches of
David scrambled to his feet, suddenly and brutally sober.
Battle had begun.
25. Bombardment
Cluster bombs were a notoriously imprecise and inaccurate form of antipersonnel hardware. Each tennis- ball-sized bomblet had so little mass that it tended to float down rather than fall and was subject to the whims and vagaries of the wind. The primary purpose of cluster bombs, over and above than the taking of life, was to cause panic and disarray. This, at Megiddo, they did not achieve. The Lightbringer's forces were so thinly spread out that the hails of bomblets mostly missed. Crops were destroyed but precious few people. The Freegyptians were amazed and relieved, and consequently kept their nerve. As the planes rumbled into the distance, they steadied themselves to meet them on their next run. The Scarab tanks lofted their blaster nozzles. The Anubian C39s took to the air.
On their second sortie the Locusts were joined by some weightier air cavalry, a brace of Russian-made Typhon bombers backed up by three Serpent attack helicopters, also from Russia. The Typhons, named after the strange doglike beast that was symbolic of Set, were fat, cumbersome things that looked about as likely to get airborne as bumblebees. But then their role wasn't to flit around and look elegant. It was to carry fusion warheads. Lots of them. And deliver them.
The Locusts bombarded the Lightbringer's lines again, but this time the Scarab tanks were ready.
The Typhons entered the fray shortly afterwards, with their Serpent escorts strafing the ground madly, trying to clear a path for them through the thickets of flak. By this time, however, the C39s were aloft and out for blood. Squadron Leader Nonomura and his men closed in on the Serpents and…
… the only word David could think of to describe it as he looked on from the mountaintop…
…
The Serpents never stood a chance. The C39s took them out with almost arrogant ease. Beams of black
The Anubians then turned their attention on the Typhons. Thicker armour made the bombers a tougher proposition than the Serpents. So did dedicated defensive gunnery.
The leading Typhon already had its bomb bay doors open and was starting to empty its payload onto the
