Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl (40 page)

29
The Tale of Rhodopis

Toward the end of the Twenty- sixth Dynasty of Egypt (said John Reed), five hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ, when Egypt was about to fall to the Persian hordes, a slave girl from Greece worked in the house of an old man. During the precious time she got to herself, Rhodopis would steal away among the olive trees and sway to music she heard in her head, perhaps the tunes of her long-lost home in Greece. One day, the elderly master, walking in the olive trees, saw Rhodopis dancing. He was entranced, and when she had finished he applauded her most enthusiastically. The very next day he presented her with a gift: a pair of ruby-red slippers in which she could dance to her heart’s content.

One day, scrubbing laundry on the rocks on the banks of the Nile, her beloved slippers got wet, and she placed them on a rock to dry. A huge falcon swooped down from the sky and snatched up one of her slippers. Unknown to Rhodopis, the falcon was actually Horus, most ancient and noble of all the Nile gods. He flew with the slipper to Sais, and the court of the Pharaoh, Amasis II, and dropped the slipper from a great height into his lap.

Amasis had yet to take a wife, and he recognized this as a message from the gods. Whoever the slipper fitted he would marry. All the maidens of the region were invited to the celebrations at Sais, and each one eagerly tried the slipper throughout the course of the festivities. Rhodopis, of course, had not gone to the festivities, because the other girls, jealous of their master’s attention to her, had locked her in a cupboard. Failing to find anyone whom the slipper fit, Amasis decreed he would travel the land and find every maiden, and she would try on the slipper. Eventually his search led him to the house of the old man, and Rhodopis was revealed as the maiden whose foot fitted the slipper, and Amasis joyfully took her to his palace in Sais to be his bride.

“Cinderella,” said Gideon. Reed had been seduced by a tale for children.

Reed nodded. “But this was no fairy story; there was no happy ever after. It is the story behind the story that counts.” He paused, as though gathering his thoughts, then said, “These were dark times, and the Persian hordes were massing under the conquering Xerxes, who swept all before him. Amasis knew it was only a matter of time before the Persians overran Egypt, so he set his scientists and theologians the task of creating a weapon so powerful and destructive that it would save Egypt from the invading armies.

“They worked on this, and at the same time Amasis ordered a pyramid built to honor Rhodopis, and to provide both a sepulcher for the couple when they died and a place for this terrible new weapon to be developed in secret, away from the eyes of the Persian spies.

“Amasis called upon Heqet, the goddess of the Nile, to provide an honor guard for what was to be kept within. Heqet is the goddess of fertility and childbirth. She selected fifteen women to give birth to her children, which were nurtured and raised to adulthood in Heqet’s temple in Sais. When the pyramid was completed they were put to the sword and embalmed, given eternal undeath by the frog-mother, and placed here to help Amasis’s plans come to fruition.

“And there they lay for nigh on two and a half thousand years. The rising waters of the Nile during particularly heavy rains caused the sepulcher to flood; one of the mummified bodies of the Children of Heqet was carried out into the river, and thence it was found by Professor Reginald Halifax, who took it to the New World.

“Halifax had found, during prior excavations, this jewel. The proximity of the amulet to the mummified Child of Heqet revived it, and the guardian of the sepulcher knew its time had come to live again. It attempted to return the jewel to the pyramid, but I intervened, and it left empty handed. It returned to the pyramid and woke the others, to begin their work in preparation for the return of Amasis.”

Gideon pointed to the items on the stone table. “Then these . . . and the artifact in Maria’s head . . .”

Reed nodded. “They had been scattered across the world; they were being transported from Sais when bandits attacked and made off with them, and from there they were traded and stolen and transported across the globe. The Children of Heqet, once awakened, set out on their task to locate them all.”

“It seems a lot of trouble to go to for some trinkets,” said Bent, looking around. “This pyramid’s stuffed with treasures. Haven’t you got enough here?”

“Do you not understand, Mr. Bent? They are merely disguised as jewels and treasures. They are, in fact, ancient Egyptian technology, indistinguishable from magic to our modern minds. They are the
weapon,
or at least what powers it.”

“What manner of weapon is this thing?” asked Gideon. He truly feared Reed’s sanity had ebbed away, with only the company of those foul mummies. It would drive anyone insane.

“Like nothing the ancients had conceived of before,” said Reed. If he was insane, thought Gideon, he was like no raving lunatic Gideon had ever imagined. There was a coldness to him that seemed to make even the torch-flames shiver. “It required the best minds and philosophers of the ancient world to create it. But time was running out. Once the Persians attacked the caravan, the weapon was rendered useless. The pieces had been forged in science and magic in temples and laboratories. A single day more, and they would have arrived here, and the weapon would have been completed. The Persians swarmed over Sais, and both Amasis and Rhodopis died in the conflict. They were taken into the pyramid and embalmed, and the sands of time conspired to hide them. The treasures were scattered across the world over the subsequent centuries.”

“Until now,” said Gideon.

Reed stood from his throne. “Finally the pieces are assembled, and the weapon is ready to be activated.”

Reed gathered up the artifacts and walked to where Maria sat patiently, listening. Gideon moved forward, but the Children of Heqet closed the gap between him and Reed.

“Not long now,” said Reed soothingly to the mummies. “Not long, then eternal sleep can be yours.”

“I won’t help you,” said Maria. “Whatever is in my head isn’t yours, Dr. Reed.”

“You’re lucky you have a head at all,” said Reed. “I wanted the artifact, not you. You can thank the Children of Heqet you aren’t headless at the bottom of the ocean. They knew more than I, that the artifact had to be aligned to a living brain. Two thousand years ago it would have been a slave; today it would have had to be some innocent stolen from the hinterland of Alexandria, I suppose. You have saved me from what I imagine would have been some rather amateur and painful surgery upon a stranger, Maria.”

Between the Children of Heqet who blocked his path, Gideon could see there was a flat wooden panel in front of Maria’s chair, with five differently shaped recesses set into it. Into the first Reed placed the amulet. “As to helping me, Maria,” he said, “if I understand everything correctly, then the choice simply isn’t yours.”

The amulet slid home with a dry sigh. Did Maria stiffen as it did so? Gideon peered at her. Was it in fear of what was to come, or something more? Reed pried the ruby—or whatever it was—from Annie Crook’s ring and placed it in the second aperture. There! Maria definitely shuddered, gazing hard into the middle distance. Gideon tried to get a better look, but one of the mummies pushed him back with a hiss and a shove to his chest.

“Trigger,” murmured Gideon. “He’s up to something.”

Trigger was pale, his eyes hollow, very much like he’d looked on his doorstep in Mayfair. Then he’d thought he’d lost John Reed. Now he
knew
he had.

As Reed placed the scarab in the fourth carved hole Maria gasped, looking straight up into the darkness. Was there a redness about her eyes, a pale, diffuse glow? Into a rectangular hole went the box, and Maria cried out in pain and surprise. Gideon shook his head and elbowed past the Children of Heqet, or tried to; this time one punched him hard in the gut, sending him sprawling.

Reed looked at the
shabti
for a moment, turning it in his fingers. “This is the last one,” he said. “When I place this into its housing, the weapon is activated.” He looked at Gideon, climbing to his feet, winded. “Any last words for the girl?”

Gideon looked at her, then back at Reed. He knew what he should say. He
knew
. But what good would it do? Instead he said, “Let her go, you fiend.”

Reed smirked. “The poet could not have done better.” He slid the
shabti
into the aperture and stepped backward, until he stood behind Maria’s tall chair. She began to shake and gasp, her arms extending stiffly in front of her, fingers splayed as though she were about to play the treasures like some kind of ancient, alien piano.

Then she spoke. Gideon frowned and looked at Trigger. It was her voice, but she was speaking no words Gideon could understand. She hissed and clicked and jabbered in a guttural tongue: the language of the Children of Heqet.

“Excellent!” said Reed. “It works! It actually works!”

“Reed! Stop now, while you can!” called Gideon.

Behind him, Stoker shook Trigger roughly. “For God’s sake, say something to him, man! You’re the only one he’ll possibly listen to now!”

“Look,” said Bent. “Eff me, look.”

The long brass hood hanging over Maria began to jerkily close, as a crocodile’s mouth might. “Stop!” screamed Gideon. “In God’s name, Reed. What have you done to Maria?”

“There is no Maria!” Reed laughed. “Whatever fiction she had built for herself, now there is only Apep.”

“Apep?” said Bent. “What’s he on about now?”

Reed’s eyes met Gideon’s as the hood— which he could now see had two large glass portholes very much like eyes— closed slowly, swallowing Maria and Reed. The look that passed between them was dripping with malice. What was it they said? About revenge being a dish best served cold? John Reed had let his vengeance chill in the sunless shadows of that pyramid, forged it in the frozen crucible of that dead, ancient air, until he had finally been delivered of the means to test the keenness of its edge.

“He’s effing insane!” shouted Bent. “Properly effing insane.”

“No, he’s not,” said Gideon. “He’s possibly the sanest man in the world. That’s why he’s so bloody dangerous.”

Maria was still uttering her unknown words—chanting, really—as the hood finally closed. Gideon could see Maria through one eye-porthole, Reed through the other.

“It is too late!” cried Reed, his voice distant within what Gideon realized with cold clarity
was,
in fact, a cruel-looking crocodile head, with rows of brass teeth beneath the—cockpit?
Cockpit
?—that Reed and Maria occupied. “Apep lives! Even the darkness bends toward my will! Just as Apep shunned order and lived to snuff out the light of Ma’at, so he shall draw a veil over the modern Babylon of London!”

Apep. The ground cracked before the crocodile vessel, a zigzagging, widening black line parting the interior of the pyramid, separating Gideon from the rest of the adventurers. The Children of Heqet fell back. The sloping walls shuddered and sent trickles of dust down. The crack widened further, and Gideon heard Bent groan as the table of food buckled and fell into it, as though the parched sand itself was hungry.

Apep. The cockpit—yes, the cockpit, because Gideon knew now what Apep was—began to rise with a hiss of ancient hydraulics and the exhalation of hidden exhausts. A neck wider than an oak tree, scaled with brass, rose up from out of the cracked earth.

Apep. One vast claw, then another, gripping the parting ground, climbing up from the bowels of the pyramid. With a terrible groaning the floor rose in the middle, sending Gideon rolling down toward the back of the pyramid. Something was forcing itself up, drawn up on those fierce claws, an obscene birth from the darkness below.

Apep. A muscular brass rear leg, then another. Then the head, the cockpit, disappeared into the shadows above, and there was a rending sound, a flood of bricks and stone and the sudden, unfamiliar sight of daylight, a clear blue lightning strike above.

“Gideon!” shouted Stoker. “Gideon! Are you alive?”

Gideon shrugged off the sand and mortar and crawled up the buckled floor, watching as the brass hind legs disappeared into the sky, dragging what looked like a many-jointed
tail
that petered down to a point.