Men of Bronze (15 page)

Barca held up a hand. “I understand your anger, but it’s misplaced on me, as is your role of a petulant slave. If you don’t like my opinion, then tell me. If you have pressing business, then go to it. You need not wait for my permission to speak or to leave.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, bowing slightly. She opened the door, stopped with one foot across the threshold. “Thank you for everything,” she said, her voice frosty, and then she was gone.

That woman had fire, Barca had to admit. Fire and strength on a magnitude that surprised even the Phoenician. Enraged, she would be a match for any man. Barca hoped she had the self-control not to go out and do something foolish. He sat in the fading light and thought about another spirited woman, a woman twenty years dead.

It was a massacre.

Phanes walked among the bodies, Lysistratis at his side. A smile twisted his perfect lips. “So, these were the feared Medjay,” he said. “How easily they were disposed of.” He spotted movement: an old soldier clawing toward the hilt of his sword. Arrows pierced his limbs and stood out from between his ribs. Phanes reached his side, kicking the Medjay’s

sword out of reach. “Your leader,” he said. “Where is he?”

Eyes filled with a terrible hate, Ithobaal raised himself on his elbows and spat blood at the Greek’s foot.

Phanes gestured, and the Spartan slit the old man’s throat.

“Kill the rest of their wounded.”

“Who is this Judaean you seek?” Lysistratis said, wiping blood from his knife on the Medjay’s kilt.

“A man of little consequence who knows far too much for his own good.”

“Think he’s here?” Lysistratis glanced around. A few bystanders had been hit along with the Medjay. A sobbing child crawled to his mother, her body riddled with arrows. Others were being pulled to the fringes of the bazaar. In all, the losses were acceptable. “Had I known …”

“You did well, Lysistratis. Not a man under your command suffered so much as a splinter. Excellent. As for the Judaean, he is here. Servants of our new-found ally followed him from his home.”

Hands clasped behind his back, the Greek stepped over the dead and dying to enter the stall of a wine merchant. An Egyptian lay face down across his wares, an arrow standing out a handsbreadth from the back of his skull. Another man lay on the ground.

Phanes smiled. It was the Judaean.

An arrow gored his hip; a second shattered his kneecap. Fear clouded his eyes as he stared up at Phanes. Fear and pain.

“Greetings, Matthias ben Iesu. I have some dire questions that need answers.”

At dusk, Barca slipped from Weni’s home and ghosted through the streets. An odd sense of expectancy tinged the air, a feeling of oppression and fear. He wondered how the Greeks reacted to finding their dead. Had they put some sort of curfew in place? Corners that should have thronged with people were deserted; houses were dark and silent. It was as if Memphis held its breath and waited for the axe to fall.

Barca returned to the Judaean’s without incident. At one time a garden thrived at the rear of the house, a holdover from a time when this part of Memphis boasted numerous mansions and villas. He paused at the base of a low wall of flaking stucco, listening. Hearing nothing, the Phoenician bounded up, caught the crumbling stone coping, and swung himself over the wall as lightly as a man mounting a horse. He dropped to the earth, scimitar half-drawn, and took in his surroundings with a glance.

A willow tree scrabbled through the hard-packed earth, gleaning a twisted existence from the dead black soil. Pottery shards crunched under foot as Barca crept past empty stalls of mud brick and wood that once housed a collection of potted plants. A skeletal grapevine hung from an arbor like an unburied corpse. Nothing moved; the air, warm and thick, bore the stench of decay. A light burned in an upper window of the house. The lack of sound disturbed Barca, as did the lack of movement. Even if his men lurked inside, Ithobaal would have posted sentries on the roof or in the garden, yet Barca saw no one.

Frowning, the Phoenician pushed open the rear door, the crack of its warped wooden hinge-pins explosive in the silence. From his left, ambient light filtered down a flight of mud brick stairs, built as an extension of the wall. In the heyday of his wealth, Matthias surrounded himself with opulence, with rugs and hangings, with furniture hand-carved from precious woods, and with vessels of alabaster and gold. Now, Barca found the extent of his friend’s poverty heartbreaking. Matthias kept this part of his house sparse, the floor bare save for a scattering of cushions and a low table strewn with the scraps of papyrus and ostraka scrounged from temple refuse heaps.

Where were his men?

A strange smell permeated the house. It floated down the stairs, tickling Barca’s nose. It reminded him of seared meat, though subtly different. The Phoenician padded to the stairs.

The upper floor was as bleak as the rest of the house. The only sign that the place was occupied at all came from Matthias’ bedchamber. A curtain covered the doorway; light spilled out from around it. Eyes narrowing to slits, Barca used the tip of his blade to push the curtain aside.

The Judaean’s sleeping place reflected his love of the heavens. A riot of loose papyrus, ostraka, and clay tablets depicted the night sky from every point of the compass. That stench … Its strength increased as the Phoenician crossed the threshold of the bedchamber.

The skin between Barca’s shoulder blades prickled; the hair stood up on the back of his neck. He spun to his left, sword extended, and felt his stomach tighten.

A man hung against the wall, his body held erect by thick bronze spikes driven through his wrists and ankles. His crucified form had been savagely tortured, his limbs broken, his face and eyes ruined. Flames had seared away his hair and beard, and a mixture of blood and liquified fat seeped through ruptures in his charred skin. There was something familiar about him. Realization struck the Phoenician, a hammer that cracked his soul.

The thing on the wall was Matthias ben Iesu.

“Who did this to you?” Barca whispered, staring at the body of his friend. The Greeks, Barca reckoned. They must have discovered Matthias was aiding the Medjay and tortured him for information.
But how?
Barca could not fathom it, but they knew he was in Memphis. Phanes would hunt him, a lethal game of cat and mouse. By all the gods! If that was the game he wanted, Barca would oblige him.

Sickened, the Phoenician turned away, looking for something to cover the body with. He would have to pry the spikes out with his sword. After that, he would find Ithobaal and …

“Barca!” a voice from the street bellowed, speaking Egyptian with a Greek accent.

The Phoenician sprang from the bed chamber and peered out one of the windows overlooking the Street of the Chaldeans. Torches flared, reflecting off the polished armor of a squad of hoplites. More were pouring from the adjacent buildings. One man stood apart from the rest, his armor silver-inlaid.

Phanes.

“Your friend, the Judaean, was a man of remarkable valor. I couldn’t tell if he spoke the truth when he said you had twenty more men with you. I only counted nineteen corpses in the bazaar. Oh, well. I’m afraid I had to get a bit … rough with him, in the end. I offer you one chance to save yourself. Swear allegiance to me, pledge your blade to my service, and you just might walk out of this with your hide intact! Time grows short! What is your answer?”

So, that was it, then? Ithobaal and the others were dead, too. Dead because they trusted him. Barca bowed his head. In the afterworld, twenty new souls occupied the Scales of Justice, swinging the balance farther toward the jaws of damnation. Twenty new souls cried out for vengeance.

To answer their call, Barca needed a way out. Anticipating his arrival, the Greeks removed the wooden stairs that led up to the rooftop terrace, leaving behind fragments only. The windows were too narrow for him to squeeze through. The back door?

“Barca?”

A quick glance revealed soldiers streaming toward the front of the house. Damn them! The Phoenician bolted down the stairs and hurtled for the back door, for the garden and the tangled alleys beyond. The sound of splintering wood brought him skidding to a halt. Over his shoulder, he watched as the front door exploded inward.

Hoplites, silhouetted by the orange glow of torches, poured through the breach. There were four of them in the vanguard, shields held at eye level. Others crowded at their backs. They were armed with hardwood clubs instead of spears.

Phanes wanted him alive.

“It’s over!” a hollow voice said. “Throw down your sword! We —” The hoplite never finished; he never knew what killed him.

Something bloody, vengeful, and utterly inhuman raged from the dark recesses of Barca’s soul, filling his veins with a lust for rich, frothy gore. The thing that seized control of his body, the Beast, thrived on pain. It thrived on carnage and chaos and bodies torn asunder. Its strength flooded his limbs. Barca loosed a savage howl as he threw himself on the hoplites. Their armor, their training, their discipline, all amounted to nothing in the face of the Phoenician’s elemental fury. His blade licked out, slashing through bronze and bone. A head leaped skyward, riding a fountain of blood. In the tight confines of the doorway, the Greeks could not bring their clubs to bear; their shields clanged against the door frame, against one another, useless. Men staggered and fell back.

Without losing stride, Barca turned from the thrashing hoplites and hurled himself at the rear door. He ducked his head, his body knotting into a compact mass of muscle and sinew as he struck shoulder first. The aged, dry wood blew apart under the impact, and Barca rolled cat-like to his feet, cursing.

Soldiers were scaling the garden wall.

There were too many of them. Barca whirled to his right. If he could make it to the top of the wall, he could snag the lower edge of the window and use it as a ladder up to the roof. Once atop the house, the Phoenician could escape across neighboring rooftops. A desperate gamble …

Greeks pounded toward him. Shouts and cries grew in volume. A half-dozen steps and Barca bounded into the air, swinging onto the wall. He crouched there for a split second, ape-like, before flinging his scimitar up onto the roof. Powerful muscles drove his body after it. Barca leapt, twisting, catching the windowsill with his fingertips. He tottered there for an instant before the mud brick of the window casing crumbled under his weight. Arms flailing, Barca plummeted, unarmed, into the midst of the Greeks.

The game was over. It was time to die. Barca resolved not to sell his life cheap.

Men went down under his weight. He grabbed a helmet crest and slammed a bronze clad skull into the ground. A knee shattered under his crushing heel.

“Back!” a voice roared above the din. “He’s mine!”

Barca sprang to his feet. Like well-heeled dogs the hoplites backed away, forming a circle. Lysistratis stepped forward, sheathed his sword, and methodically stripped off his armor.

“I’ve heard of you, Phoenician! You’re rumored to be the best fighter in Egypt, bar none. Faugh! A reputation gleaned fighting desert rats is no reputation at all! I’m willing to match my pure Spartan blood against the thin eastern piss flowing through your veins any day! Come!”

Without bluff or bluster, Barca hurled himself at Lysistratis. Here were two savage fighters: one the scion of a warrior culture, the other born to it naturally, both evenly matched in height and size. Fists hammered flesh as the two danced together then sprang apart, their long shadows alien in the wan torchlight.

In that instant of contact, Lysistratis encountered something that left him chilled and shaking. He encountered a man stronger and faster than himself. A flurry of punches rocked the Phoenician’s head back; Barca’s riposte shattered the Spartan’s nose and very nearly broke his neck.

Back and forth they went. Sweat and blood poured down the Spartan’s face; his eyes burned with hate. No blow, no matter how powerful, could slow Barca’s assault. He fought in a single-minded frenzy that would not abate until one of them lay broken and bleeding on the ground. It was not like fighting a man — it was like fighting a creature of elemental rage.