appreciated for their mousing, and birds with feathers to take one’s breath away. That’s why I fed the mouse.
I stayed up later with the book than Silano and Astiza, puzzling whether this word fit that one, and if oddities such as “in your world, random chance is the foundation of fatalistic predetermination” made any sense at all. I finally took a brief break on our porch, the stars thick in the moist close darkness of the summer sky, and asked an orderly for some food to be brought. It took too long, but finally I was given a plate and went back inside to sit at our table and nibble at
Then I bent back to work. So many choices! I marveled at the symbols, noticing suddenly how they seemed to shift and slide, rotate and tumble. I blinked, the words blurry. I was more tired than I realized! But if I could decipher where the sentence ended, or whether Thoth used sentences in the modern sense at all . . .
Now the scroll was wavering. What was going on? I looked over to the corner. The mouse, as big as a small rat at home, had flopped onto its side and was quivering, its eyes wide with terror. Foam was at its mouth.
I shoved my plate away and stood.
“Astiza!” I tried to cry, but it was a throttled mumble from a thick tongue, heard by no one but myself. I took a tottering step. That bastard Silano! He figured he didn’t need me anymore! I remembered his threat of poisoned pig in Cairo, the year before. Then I was falling, not even sure what had happened to my legs, and hit the floor so hard that lights danced before my eyes. Through a haze I could see the mouse dying.
Men stole in the room to scoop me up. Yet how was he going to explain this murder to Astiza? Or did he plan to assassinate her 2 8 0
w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h
too? No, he still wanted her. They hoisted, grunting, and carried me between them like a sack of flour. I was dizzy, but conscious—probably because I’d barely tasted the dish. They assumed I was dead.
We went out a side gate and down to the river and garrison privy, watered by a canal. Beyond it was a small lagoon off the main river, redolent of lotus and shit. With a swing back and forth they pitched my body, helpless as a baby.
With a splash, I went under. Did they mean to make it look like a drowning?
Yet the shock of the water revived me a little, and panic gave my limbs some motion. I managed to flop back to the surface and take a breath, treading water. The shallow dose was wearing off. My two would-be executioners watched me, curiously not very alarmed by my resilience. Didn’t they realize I hadn’t eaten enough poison? They were making no move to shoot me, or wade in after to finish me off with sword or ax.
Maybe I could paddle and find help.
It was then that I heard a big splash behind me.
I turned. There was a low dock in the lagoon, and with a rattle a chain was unreeling, its links snaking toward me. What the devil?
My escorts laughed.
Coming toward me in the dark were the protruding nostrils and reptilian eyes of that most loathsome and hideous of all beasts, the Nile crocodile. This prehistoric nightmare, armored in scales, thick as a log, a torpedo of muscle, can be astonishingly quick in and out of the water. It is old as dragons, as unfeeling as a machine.
Even in my fuddled state their plot came to me. Silano’s scoundrels had chained the predator in this lagoon to dispose of me by eating me. I could hear the count’s story. The American had used the privy, walked to the Nile to wash or gaze out at the night, the croc came out of the water—it had happened in Egypt a thousand times before —and snick, snack, I was gone. Silano would have stone, scroll, and woman. Checkmate!
I’d just processed this disagreeable scenario, acknowledging its ingenious perfidy with dull admiration, when the animal struck. It t h e
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snatched me under, clamping my leg but not yet chewing it, and rolled us, in its time-honored habit of drowning its prey. The perfect horror of that vise, its long mouth of overlapping teeth, its mossy scales, the dim blankness of its expression, all somehow registered in my mind and shocked me into action despite the pain and poison. I freed my tomahawk from my belt as we whirled and struck the beast on his snout, no doubt surprising him with my little sting as much as he’d surprised me. His jaws snapped open, as if on a spring, releasing my leg, and I chopped again, hitting the roof of his mouth where the tomahawk lodged. The lagoon erupted as the crocodile writhed, and as it twisted I felt its chain slithering by me. Instinctively I grabbed.
The animal and its chain carried me upward, my head broke water, and I seized breath. Then we dove again, the croc trying to turn to bite me, even as each snapping of its jaws must have driven the tomahawk painfully deeper. I dared not let his mouth get close. I pulled myself frantically forward on his chain until I got to where it made a necklace around the monster’s neck, just before its forelegs. I hung on.
Twist as it might, it couldn’t bite me.
We dove, so I jabbed at its eyes. Now it thrashed like a bucking horse as I barely held on. We’d break surface and then submerge, wallow in the mud of the shallow bottom, and then surge upward again. I could hear the dock cracking and squealing behind as the beast yanked furiously on its chain. The laughter of my captors had stopped. My leg was bleeding, the blood making the crocodile’s thrashing even more frantic as he smelled. I had no way to kill the beast.
So when our writhing brought us near the dock I let go and swam for it. No man has ever left the water that fast. I flew to get up on the wood.
The croc turned, wrapped in its own chain, and came after me, its snout crashing into the splintery dock. It bit, grunting at the pain of my tomahawk as it did so, snapping boards in two. The dock began to sink toward its snout as I scrabbled up its slope. I heard confused shouts from the men who’d thrown me in. Then I spied the post where the chain was wrapped and when a surging charge slacked the 2 8 2
