Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (5 page)

     “Yeah, that’s me,” I said, wondering if I should just pick the fight and get it over with.  It occurred to me that, at its very best, the rest of my life would be like this.  Fighting other people to be one step up from the bottom.  No money, no future, no fair shake – and no one to blame but my damn self.  I seemed preordained to screw up.

     As if he read my mind, the other man said, “They say you a lifetime loser, man.  They say you kicked out of the Navy, say you have an ax to grind, that they going to lock you up.”

     “Whatever,” I said, hoping he would just shut up.  But he didn’t.

     “No, man – don’t you be giving up, now.  You look at me, and what you see?”  He spread his arms wide, his big chest rippling underneath a loose-fitting cotton shirt.  “Just another bruddah, huh?  Well, I tell you something, you’d be wrong, man!”

     And he leaned close to me, so I could smell his breath, and unlike the cop’s, his smelled sick, sweet like dead things smell, like his insides were dead even though he kept moving on the outside.

     “I am my own religion, man,” he whispered, his eyes sparkling.

     Oh, man!  “Look, I had enough of Jesus freaks in the Navy-“

     “Pah, don’t tell me ‘bout no Jesus, man – this ain’t about no Jesus.  I’m an Egyptian, man.  I’m the last high priest of Anubis, and I tell you, man, Anubis can walk you right out through these bars like they wasn’t here, man.”

     “Yeah, well, I am the Green-Freaking-Lantern, myself,
man
, so I don’t need no Jesus and I don’t need no Anubis, either.”

     The other man shook his head.  I didn’t know what an Egyptian looked like so I didn’t know if he was one
. If so, then he was the biggest one I ever saw.  I didn’t look forward to him going on about his god all night.

     Most of what he had to spew covered not giving up, about faith.  That pissed me off worse than anything, because giving up wasn’t on my itinerary. 
I wasn’t giving up.  I might not beat this – those guys were going to lie, like that junior officer had – but that didn’t mean it could beat me.

     As for faith – I didn’t want to hear it.  God didn’t care about me.

    “Look, shut up, OK?”

     “Oh, you don’t want to hear about Anubis – you don’t want to be free of this place?”

     “Sure, I want to be free of this place, but you know what?  That ain’t gonna happen.  I killed a cop’s brother to save a dog, so quite frankly, your Anubis is about all that
could
get me out of this situation if he were real, which he isn’t.  And like the rest of the world, he doesn’t have any reason to help me.”

     I’d had enough of religious people in the Navy.  This belief that ‘god’ comes out and helps you for no reason.  A nice fantasy, but nothing in my life ever went that way and I didn’t doubt that nothing ever would.

     “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, man.  You have had a whole destiny that brought you to me right now.  So if none of it ain’t your fault, and if you could
believe
in Anubis, then he
would
have a reason for getting you out of here.”

     “Yeah?” I asked. “What reason?  Why should he be any different than anyone else?”

     “You fought the just cause, man,” he said.  “You coulda kept walkin’, but you didn’t.  You a
warrior
, man!  You fought for the one who couldn’t fight for himself.”

     “Yeah,
right
!”

    
“If he took you out of here, would you be willing to believe in him, then, man?”  The Egyptian’s eyes shone bright – obviously, this is what he had been working toward all along.  He stood a good three feet from me now and still I could smell the sick-sweet reek from his breath.  I felt exhausted, tired of fighting, tired of being fought, tired of the cards life had dealt me and how I had played them.

    
I’d fought for the dog, but they killed it anyway.  What did its suffering really matter?  What did
anything
matter now?

     “Sure,” I told him.  “Sure, mother fucker – if Anubis can get me through these bars right now, then I’ll convert.
  You got your warrior.”

     “Then give me your hand, man,” he told me and he reached out a huge black paw to me.

     I reached up from where I sat and I knew that doing this must be fundamentally wrong.  I looked at those dark, clutching fingers and watched them enfold my lily-white hand.  That grip felt as cold as a tomb, as if he had been holding ice, but dry and rough like sandpaper.  I watched him with his hand holding mine as he reached up his other hand, the palm up, toward the one overhead light in the ceiling. 

     He looked down at me, sitting on the cot, and his eyes flashed yellow.  This was no trick of any light – his eyes turned yellow like a feral animal’s.  I remembered where I’d seen eyes like that before.

     I looked past him and could see a single, uncovered, 100-watt bulb in the cieling.  I would have thought they would cover those things, so that the inmates wouldn’t break them. 

     And it would have been a good idea because the Egyptian with the yellow eyes drove his thumb right up into it, and the current ran through us both.  For some reason I remembered, from Nuclear Power School, electronics training for Mechanics, “It takes .1 amperes of electricity to kill you instantly.”

    
In the prison block, the overweight guard munched his Hostess
Donettes
and watched his favorite show on the television.  To his surprise, the power blinked, and he heard the
slam
of a circuit breaker opening.  As the inmates started yelling and swearing, he heard a low groan and guessed what must have happened. 

    
He grabbed his keys and his baton and hit the “assist” button to bring other guards to help him. There were only five inmates here tonight: two car thieves, a drunk, a dope dealer and a murderer.  He couldn’t remember if he had taken all of their belts and shoelaces but was pretty sure he hadn’t.

    
He unlocked the first gate to the long hall between the cells.  County lock-up wasn’t as elaborate as a prison, just a block of ten opposing cells.  First two: drunk snoring, car thief screaming, pointing down the hall.  Second two: One empty, dope dealer swearing, eyes wide.  Third two: both empty.  Fourth pair: car thief, sitting on the ground, holding his head – he is OK.

    
Fifth pair: empty.  The prison guard stopped in his tracks.  He looked into the dark cell.  The toilet had no seat; he could see the water running.  The bed had been laid in and he could see a crease in the gray blanket.  The cover was still on the light although the bulb was dark.  There were no marks on the gate or the lock.

    
But he himself had locked that big, freaking Viking in here.  He’d seen him sit; seen the beaten look on him.  Yeah, that one might have offed himself somehow – figured out how to do it with the light.

    
The guard ran back to light off the “Escape” alarm.  Well, he couldn’t have gotten too far.  How hard would it be to find Goldilocks on steroids?

     Nothing – no pain, no smell, so sense of touch.  I floated in a void, with a sense of motion that belied going
to
or
from
anywhere.  I couldn’t tell if my eyes were shut or open, or even if I
had
eyes any longer.  I was dead, electrocuted,
en route
either to heaven or hell.

    
Not precisely,
a voice like a kettledrum boomed in my head.  You couldn’t doubt that you had heard a voice like that, more of something that you wished to
never
hear.

    
Hello?

    
I wonder if that is how you addressed your Earthly God.

    
Um, no…

    
Then address Me as you would him, for now I am God to you.

    
This left me a lot to consider. First, something called itself my God and, secondly, if it didn’t come from Earth, then where did it come from?

    
I am not a patient being.

    
What God are you?  Then the Egyptian’s promise struck me.

    
Anubis?

    
{A chuckle} So, you were, in fact, converted of your own free will?

    
Um, I guess.

    
Then I tell you, I am to Anubis as you are to the smallest thing that crawls upon the ground.  He exchanged you to Me for more power then he could ever in his Earthly existence know.

    
You traded something like that for me?

    
You will give Me more than ever that bauble could.

    
{My turn to laugh, if only in my mind} Wow, do they have the shell game on your world?  Anubis pulled a bait-and-switch on you.

    
I felt him in my mind then – it felt like the most personal rape you could suffer, gone as quickly as it began.  Afterward I felt like I had been left floating in a septic tank and couldn’t figure a way out.

    
You are mistaken, not I.

    
If you say so, God.  So now what?

    
You are come to my realm, now.  I will give you a weapon of Mine, which I forbid you to lose, and some small amount of food.  Then you are on your own to live your own life.

    
Um, my track record for doing that isn’t really very good –

    
Enough!

    
My body, at that point, felt more pain than I would have thought existed in the whole world.  It felt as if he had touched every fiber, every niche, and every part of every cell in my body and lit them all on fire.  An assault on every level, like slipping toes first into a blast furnace while licking a light socket and being castrated by your father.  What I still identified as my body twisted in agony.  I could envision being forced to pull back my finger and toenails and pour acid on the undersides, gouge out my own eyes, a million other personal torments, leaving me humiliated, ashamed, wracked in pain. He left me panting with my mind on fire.

    
Looking back, if our God were to make us feel this way, then called it Hell, we would be a race of loyal Christians, Muslims, Jews – whatever He chose, and we would serve Him without question.

    
It worked for me.  I would do whatever it took to not feel that way again.

    
I do not enjoy My will being questioned.

    
No, Lord.

    
You will live your life, apply yourself, grow and do well.

    
I will, I promise.

    
You will fulfill your destiny – it is inevitable.  You are the One.

    
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said nothing.  I can’t describe the fear I felt.  Even though I couldn’t feel a scrap of the pain I had been subjected to, the memory of it grew like a shadow across my mind.  Knowing that I could be made to feel that way again I would have killed myself if I could have.

    
I will deliver you – but one last thing: tell no one your name.

    
My name?  So, I should make up a name?

    
Even that is dangerous.  Change names – a name is power, knowing it is power over you.  Let no one have power over you for long.  That is for Me.  Take common names that will identify others besides you.

    
I will, I promise.

    
Be gone, then.

    
A blinding light washed over me.  My eyes felt the pain, but nothing compared to that one brief moment.  I think it was Nietchze who said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  I welcomed this new pain because it proved in my mind that something could hurt less than that one experience.

    
I would like to say I woke up, but I hadn’t slept.  I simply had my body again and could feel it.  I lay on my back, sand in my hair, dampness seeping up through my clothes from the ground.  I felt something hard in my hand, like a small can with knobs.  I opened my eyes up to a blue, blue sky and a few white clouds.  I smelled salt water.  I looked to my left, my scalp grinding on the sand, and saw stark, gray mountains, then to my right, and saw a wide lake.  It must be salt water, I thought.  I looked at my right hand and saw what it held: a long, polished sword, double-edged, glistening and new, its handle wrapped in braided leather.  The blade was about four feet long. I stood in one motion, my legs wobbly, and hefted it.

    
It felt
right
somehow – like it belonged in my hand. 

    
I hadn’t learned to be a “swordsman.”  In fact, the closest I had ever come was sparring on the mock battlefields of a Renaissance Fair.  I had shown some talent at that – although I never became a “knight” or anything similar, I had stood toe to toe with some of their better fighters, and once in a while beat them.

    
If swords were the weapons of choice here, though, I had to assume that I would be meeting people who used them for a living, and who were a lot better with them than I.  If I wanted to be safe here I would need to train.

    
I knew as well that this would take money.  I took stock of my possessions.  I wore what must be a homespun shirt, made of a cotton-like fiber, off-white, only two seams in it, running under the arms and down the sides.  My head came up through a bunched collar; just a hole cut and stitched once the shirt had been made.  The pants I wore were brown leather, thick, already pinching my skin.  I wore what looked like thick, black motorcycle boots, including the chain across the instep.

    
I found a thin leather pouch on my belt and, inside, some kind of wafers wrapped in broad, green leaves.  I didn’t feel hungry so I didn’t taste them – no point in starting off by wasting food.  I didn’t have a single coin or anything that looked like a coin or anything valuable on me.  Food wouldn’t be a coin of the realm.  Societies wanted to trade in tough, physical objects, like livestock or precious metals or such.  You wouldn’t want to go from rich to poor because the weather changed and your food rotted – unless you were a farmer.

    
I saw no grass, no village, nothing to eat.  Far to the north there seemed to be a wide plain on the horizon, but no road and nothing to indicate that there were people there.  The sun was directly overhead, not that it mattered.  I had no idea if civilization, should there even be one, lay to the north, south, east or west.  In fact, I might be the only one here – Adam looking for his Eve.

    
Unlikely.  Why would I need a sword?  Swords are made for killing other people and are inefficient for hunting.  I looked at it again and touched the blade with my thumb, nicking it immediately.  Wow, sharp – a tough edge.

    
I had been told to seek my destiny – I didn’t know how aggressive my God would be with me now, but I didn’t want to test Him.  I tucked the pouch in my belt and started walking along the lake right then and, as an afterthought, began to jog.  My leather pants seated themselves comfortably to my form and my boots creaked.  The sword grew heavy quickly, and I had no sheath to carry it.  I tried resting the blade in my free hand and cut the heel of my palm.  I walked and ran alternately for hours, winding myself as I tried to adjust my running.  The sun crossed the sky to my left behind me.  Because it felt warm and these were mountains, I assumed that this season was summer and from the direction of the sun I was moving south. 

    
When it began getting dark I stopped and looked for a place to sleep.  There were no trees or bushes – the salt water would kill any plants near it.  The mountains were about an hour from me to the east.  I saw no point in getting sidetracked going there. 

    
The plains were no longer visible to the north.  Maybe that would have been the right way to go.  I’d be more likely to find game there, though predators knew that too.  I shook my head as I prepared myself to sleep out in the open with no protection from the elements.  This would be acceptable right now until my new God decided to send some Providence my way.

    
I lay on my back, looking up at the foreign stars as the sky darkened.  So many!  I used to love the nights at sea, away from the lights and smells and noise of cities.  I would sneak out onto my cruiser’s flight deck after ‘lights out’ and lay on my back, feeling the rough non-skid that coated the steel deck on my shoulders.  At first I would see nothing as my eyes adjusted, just feel the ship rocking on the ocean beneath me.  After a few minutes I would see all the stars, all of the millions of tiny dots of light, a wash of white across the sky.  Then the constellations really
looked
like constellations.  City lights blot out ninety percent of them for miles.  Only deep in the mountains or at sea now can you see them.

    
Then, like now, I would feel alone, one being adrift like a leaf on a pond, not going anywhere, accomplishing nothing.  Life in Naval nuclear power came like an imperative – we always had more work to do, things to get done, or another project.  I felt some of that now, this destiny of which I knew nothing.  Apply myself, but to what?

    
I felt
so
thirsty!  I would try the water in the morning if it didn’t rain, though rain came with its own problems.  For primitive man, a cold could kill if fever set in.  At 22 I could be middle-aged, pushing old.  I wondered at what useful skills I had.  I could make rough furniture, doubtless there were many better.  I could fight – I had a sword – but, again, there must be many better.  Somehow I doubted they would need a mechanic, much less a nuclear reactor mechanic.  My construction experience might be useful.

    
Who knows, maybe they needed a famous architect?

    
I thought these thoughts as I fell into a dreamless sleep.  I would have thought that my dreams would be disturbed by so many traumas, but I had exhausted myself and fell right asleep.  I awoke famished, a mouth full of grit, sand in my clothes where I had tossed and turned all night, still clutching the sword which, somehow, had not cut me while I slept.  I stood and resisted rubbing my eyes, knowing that my hands must be dirtier than they felt.  I looked around and saw mostly what I had seen when I had fallen asleep.  A light fog hung around me, and the air felt chilly.