Crematorium for Phoenixes (13 page)

Time seemed an eternity in which each
company waited as the two figures undressed. As if in agreement, at
one point, they were both finally done and under the bright
sunlight emerged two women.

“They are beautiful” was telepathically
shared at the same by the men because they had lowered their
weapons, enjoying the brownish tan, bleached hair, and light
affliction crossing the women’s facial features.

“Remove yourself from the creature!” Drake
commanded them, adjusting with movements the settings of his weapon
to “Max.”

“Or what? You and the rest of the gang will
kill us?” said one of the women as if inviting him. She challenged
him with a mild, low sob.

“I do not want to hurt you, that’s all,”
added the leader, still aiming at the creature that was wrapped
like a cocoon and kicked like a helpless child, biting with his
weak, barely grown teeth.

“And you want to destroy a part of our world
by killing our brother?” said the other sister, who turned and
removed the fabric from the inside, which was as repugnant as a
jumping toy; it was weakened by the small movements of the little
vampire.

“That . . . Thed is your brother?” Victor
asked, ejecting the release by the trigger hand. A small roll of
paper came out from one of his pockets.

“Yes,” said one of the women with that
brevity with which the small sorrows of this world are made. In
short, it stabbed at the very fibers of the soul.

“How is that possible?” said Amos Oz, whose
cry was taken up by the other men.

“You tell me,” said one of the sisters,
stroking the creature that had suddenly quieted down.

“How come you have nothing in common?” said
Victor Drake, developing the roll of paper.

“Oh, yeah, and when people like you, with
strange armor, came to our parents and promised that the old
culture would again be revived and slowly restored to its previous
life, we had a lot in common, right?

“You promised that everything, even the new
God would be forgotten, and my brother would be loaded with great
honor to help with that. Well, as you can see, he is filled with
the power to lay down as a helpless parasite. Dropped leagues are
able to delete that.”

“But we are not those people . . .” Victor
began.

“And what? Life for you is a toy that can be
hurled into the flames with ease if things get too ugly. Well, for
your convenience, these have become such ones. You don’t have the
faintest idea what you have set into the trap of destiny. Toward
you, with quiet, but still listening steps, is approaching the
horror that surrounds you in the past, present, and the
future.”

“However, I do not understand what you
mean,” maintained Drake, but he was interrupted again.

“You think that we’re okay? We are more
miserable than that thing laying in front of us.

“Maybe those nice stories are known by all:
the sick are healed, the blind can see, and the lame can walk.

“But often in the coming days, we lose what
we have until we are alone in the darkness.

“And I realized that there is nothing worse
than a crippled hope because there is no treatment for such a
thing.”

Everybody fell silent, and Victor ran a hand
over his eyes and said, “You may not believe me, but I
understand.

“I cannot give you a perfect solution where
the words of wisdom are crossing each other. As you said
yourselves, sometimes bitterness stops everything that can be said
or done. Everything is like badly mixed dough from which the
weakest cards are accounted.

“I do not know what it is that keeps the
world together. Maybe it’s the little faith pressed as the lost
luggage compartments of life.

“But we should try, by God, in the name of
the rest of the molecules of expectation; we have to do
something.

“This is not your brother.”

“And you say that after a little speech in
order to cross out everything, rubbing his eyes and clapping our
foreheads. Do you think we can live, as they say, happily, for the
rest of our days?”

“And even the most astute among the living
and the dead cannot determine how they lived their days.”

“And we have to kill our brother?”

“I never said such a thing,” Victor said and
still waved to the others to approach. “Just one moment in your
life someone must leave the pain behind. Or they should have to
take with you and what is beyond. It should be done for him or
because for everything in the past, isn’t worth it.

“Every day is a drink with a bitter taste
that is brought to us whether we want it or not.

“And the season to the point of taking has
little faith, hope, and love.

“And it is these things that I will ask you.
I can help you. But as it usually happens, not entirely.”

“What do you mean?”

“Treatment may be fatal to one or all of
you. Maybe not. It is possible to cripple you in the same way.
Nobody knows how the dice will fall. Well, what do you say?”

The sisters looked at each other like people
who have already shared a part of themselves. The glance was short
but seemed to continue for centuries.

“Well, what should we do?” they asked at
last.

“Gather in a circle around your
brother.”

They all gathered around the misshapen
creature.

Being anaesthetized, it moved its puny limbs
while a chirping bird on the fence recoiled.

Victor Drake unrolled the parchment and
handed them the knife. He gave them a sign to make a small
wound.

They performed that and waited for the
second instruction.

“Now, you just need to simultaneously tap
the paper. I hope that the tide of life will bring you something
nice.”

The sisters exchanged glances; they stroked
the monster and said, “All right, let’s do it.”

Their bloodied hands reached out to touch
the shriveled paper.

The degenerate, who hitherto was still,
suddenly stood up. His lizard eyes had the luster of expiry coals
and a few tears of blood streamed from them, falling down his
face.

“You cannot stop the Apollyon Project,” he
said just before he died. “It will take place in Arabia, because it
will be written for deleted books.”

Then an electric arc pierced them all and
the sisters were no longer standing.

The heat reached its apogee. The beetle came
from its tree, which was hiding the great game of life being played
by predators and prey.

Somewhere out there, like tiny scurrying
ants, a few shadows descended and sank into the thick foliage.

Chapter
Twenty

Hundreds of cauldrons were boiling in rows,
letting milky foam smack and squash vegetables.

Around them, mixing them with Durell pots
that looked like paddles, hurried a swarm of chefs. They turned to
cast in more and more morsels, wrapping cuts of meat in tallow
veils.

A large crowd of women were beetling over
mortars, cutting the ingredients and tinging the air with the
unimaginable din of all dialects that occurred in the thousands of
kilometers of the Nile.

Among them, squeezed between the sun with
their visitors brown bagged, diverged thousands of arrivals and
departures. They formed a crowd that spread across the sifted as
hardened snow-white pumice; it was the majestic city of Inebu-Hedge
or Memphis.

Slightly raised up, floor by floor, were the
works that all of Egyptians had been harnessed to make.

Thousands of pairs of oxen were working with
faint men. Together they were pulling the sledges of blocks up a
huge ramp that started from the coast and ended in front of
buildings that were under construction. They ramps were like an
elongated basilisk.

Among them were guards—olive-black
mercenaries that strained the Egyptian language with dialects of
odd suffixes that could only come from the sandy sides of Seth, but
this came at the expense of perfectly speaking with the whip that
brought the builders in line.

Further down, as we have portrayed, were
quartered the bartenders who were cooking more and more food for
the ten thousand-strong crowd working under the coppery sun.

In this sea of people that moved in
apparent chaos, but was guided by an unelected official apparatus,
were Tammuz, Sharukin, and the others, breaking their way in the
congested, makeshift roads.

They stopped to glean information from
anyone who was not busy with work and willing to give it the
strange “henebu” who seemed unusually generous. It was apparent
that they were on a curious endeavor; truly only the higher circles
of the royal and priestly aristocracy knew what was going on.

But it was quite difficult.

For many, the construction of the Pharaoh’s
tomb, from whence he would ascend to become their fathers, the
gods, with their fiery chariots, was an implied task and
talkativeness was thwarted by their religious taboo.

But here and there someone—usually a
builder, often an alcoholic old man who ceaselessly went about his
small obligations, was willing to share his load but it was not
easy to separate the valuable pieces of information from the
ceaseless patter of chatter.

However, the men were careful, because the
“eyes and ears” (spies) of the palace were everywhere. This spoke
of the brutal and effective way in which they dealt with any gossip
from troublemakers or discontents.

So they presented themselves when the eyes
were watching them as testifying for Egyptianized Phoenicians with
their religious fervor, which had been instilled by colonialism.
This was the reason for their decision to come to worship in the
great temples of the south, which were preached about by the true
almighty gods.

Thus predisposed to an escalation by
fanatical peasants, they learned that the construction work didn’t
stopped day or night. Sundays were a day of rest though, when
people here trusted, based on the tremulous ecstasy and crescendo
of their voices, that the Pharaoh and the high priests met with the
gods themselves.

Equipped with this new information, the men
looked around the huge skeleton; they sought, as we would say in
our time, security breaches.

Indeed, after an exhaustive search, they
found such things, but the warning of impalement for intruders had
shown them the fate that what awaited them if they failed.

This is how a few weeks passed—a period of
time during which nothing noteworthy happened.

The men were hanging on the constructed
monuments; Tammuz used his knowledge to reposition dislocated
joints, which was not a rarity here, and thus he tied and dated
them, with opening access to higher and higher places in the
hierarchy.

Soon in all of the buildings the stranger
with the tattoos and his retinue were known. They were assigned in
the endless lists as “eating bread” and otherwise served as
doctors.

In this way, they cleared up some of the
suspicion surrounding them. The men often stayed up until all were
exported by boats on the river, and sometimes they helped the
undertakers who were the last living people allowed to remain.

Indeed, while they were burying the dead,
laboring in a mass, unmarked grave, they saw that in the
construction work over the pyramids soared a thing that shined;
their golden tops looked like swarms of fireflies.

They could only speculate on it though
because at every attempt to ask the gravediggers about the sight,
their companions would cover their faces with their hands and begin
to recite endless prayers.

These lights moved and were especially
active in the cycles of the moon, which suggested a ritual whose
mystery was shrouded by the sands of the desert, as if whispering
black magic and witchcraft.

Even from the distance that separated them,
the men felt as if they were there and they shivered at the thought
that they would be at the incarnation of the beginning to see what
came out from the primary desires of humanity, from the stone
statues.

But the intruders caught before them—usually
misled stuttering village idiots, who were strangled with
obscurantist publicity showed that no one, absolutely no one, could
disturb the meetings with the fathers from the heavens.

So, armed with all the patience that could
be expected from them, Sharukin, Tammuz, and the other stayed for
weeks and weeks, laboring from dawn to dusk, until one October
night when everything came to an end.

Ragged clouds who were looking as if they
had been torn by claws; they were concealing the shiny obsidian
moon.

Several vultures were circling over the
sites, rummaging around the cold stone as the destroyers of
graves.

The ink black river lapped its waters as a
stream of souls came from nothing into nothing in the vast
underworld.

The scaffolding of the buildings was also
covered in darkness and the night twilight took the form of
something that had been created from the subconscious of the
mentally ill.

The group had just finished their dinner,
putting their fingers in the ceramic jugs, when their colleagues,
the gravediggers—people poorer than the Pharaoh they serving—began
to prepare to leave, sipping the last bit of their beer.

“Where to, brothers?” asked Tammuz, chopping
the words now that he was accustomed to their specific African
dialect.

“At midnight, there will be a ceremony,”
they said that with the gloominess that only pragmatic minds create
with so much death around them. “Today, we have already worked
enough for the living.”

“Well, we’ll stay,” Tammuz told them,
stretching his hands from the evening chill. “We have to earn more
pennies.”

The diggers nodded. They knew exactly what a
curse it was to fool the stomach every day with earnings from the
hands. They picked up their bronze tools, climbed onto a raft, and
left.