The Magnificent 12 (5 page)

Seven

T
he Golden Temple is really, actually, gold. It's covered in gold, not gold paint. Gold gold. It's rectangular, and sits surrounded by water in an artificial lake. All around the lake are ornate, impressive white buildings that are part of the whole temple complex, but the thing that draws your attention is definitely the temple itself.

Because it's gold.

It looks like the jewelry box a queen or empress might own. Like maybe you could sort of pry the top off and it would be full of bracelets and earrings and rings.

There's a narrow, covered causeway leading out across the water to the temple. Music is playing over loudspeakers. It's not great music, really, but hey, it's music. And people from all over the world sort of shuffle down the causeway to get a look inside the temple.

There is a strict no-cuts rule, but Mack dealt with the line by showing up on a dragon. It's amazing the effect a turquoise dragon will have on people waiting in line. Fortunately the water in the lake is shallow, so the panicked worshippers and assorted tourists were in no danger of drowning as they leaped shrieking off the causeway.

Xiao landed, and Mack and Stefan dismounted at the end of the causeway, which was now almost completely clear.

“Shall I change back?” Xiao asked.

“Probably yes. I'm not sure how they feel about dragons in their temple.”

The three of them—Mack, Stefan, and Xiao—walked quickly to the entrance of the temple. An old man in a bright-yellow turban stepped out to block their path. He didn't look happy about it, and in fact he was trembling a bit, but since he had a fantastic, very-nearly-impossible white beard, Mack was also trembling.

“You . . . you . . . you . . . ,” the man said.

“Uh-uh-uh-uhuhuhuhuh!” Mack said.

“Move aside, old dude,” Stefan said threateningly.

Fortunately Xiao was there and had the presence of mind to ask the old man what he wanted. It turned out all he wanted was for them to take off their shoes and cover their heads. With a palsied hand he offered them scarves for that last part.

It's one thing to go busting into temples with a bully and a dragon, but at the very least you have to observe the customs. So it was barefoot and scarf-headed that the three of them stepped into the Golden Temple of Amritsar.

Which was also mostly golden inside. But not just gold like someone had spray-painted a garage or whatever. No, this was gold that had been hammered on, gold on top of more gold, gold designs against gold backgrounds. Part of the ceiling had a shallow, scallop- shaped dome that was encrusted with gold and from which hung a massive chandelier made of, you guessed it . . . crystal.
27

There was also a sort of awning set up inside where Mack assumed holy people sat and said holy things. But there was no one there at the moment. Apparently it was not a 24/7 service.

There was also an open second level, also gold, with a gold railing, a gold . . . Well, okay, you get the point: gold.

But one thing was clear: Valin was nowhere to be seen.

“I thought there were going to be lentils,” Stefan said, disappointed.

“Valin came here,” Mack mused. “Why? Why here?”

“I will question the old gentleman,” Xiao said. “He's fleeing, but he's fleeing slowly.”

It was true. The old man was fleeing very slowly, and Xiao easily caught up with him. She was back seconds later—just after Mack stopped Stefan from prying a gold flower off the wall—with the news that a very strange boy with a sword, and a man all in green, had indeed entered the temple.

“The man says they spoke some words of a language he did not know and disappeared,” Xiao reported.

The man with the amazing white beard had nerved himself to come back after Xiao reassured him. And now he pointed helpfully to a spot. There was nothing very interesting about this spot except, obviously, it was in the Golden Temple. But the spot itself wasn't different from a thousand other spots. Except for the ceiling fan.

Yes, there are ceiling fans in the Golden Temple, and yes, they are gold. In this case, though, probably just gold paint.

Mack stared up thoughtfully at the fan, which was turning slowly. Xiao and Stefan stood beside him, likewise staring thoughtfully up at the fan. Although Stefan's precise thought was, So where's the lentils?

Here's the thing to know: the people who worship at the temple are not exactly the same as the people who built the temple. The Golden Temple was started in the sixteenth century, and back in those days people knew that you couldn't just build a golden temple in the middle of a sacred lake without causing some disturbances in the space-time continuum. Of course in those ancient times they didn't call it the space-time continuum because that concept wasn't invented until
Star Trek
in the twentieth century. But those ancient builders knew some things. They knew there was something strange and compelling and magical about this spot, which back then was actually in the middle of a forest, not a city.

In fact, when they were first building the temple, they hoped to keep that strange force under control with four walls and four entrances and a lot of stone, marble, jewels, and gold.

It worked. For four centuries it worked.

Then, modern folk decided they needed some comfort. So they added ceiling fans. Had they just put in air-conditioning, that would have been fine. But a ceiling fan? That's a vortex, my friends, and vortices
28
are known disturbers of the space-time continuum.

Especially if you add Vargran.

“What words did Valin speak?” Mack mused.

“We may never know,” Xiao said.

“What are lentils anyway?” Stefan wondered.

“Wait,” Mack said, and snapped his fingers. And then his cell phone chimed to let him know that he had a voice mail, and worshippers and tourists alike, who had begun to filter back in, shushed him and gave him some hard stares, so he muted the phone, thus continuing to doom Richard Gere Middle School.
29

“What if we tried . . .” And then Mack said, “
Unt-ma nos Vargran!
”

Unt-ma
being the “or else” tense of the verb
repeat
. And
nos
meaning “earlier.”

Suddenly the breeze blowing off the fan was a lot stiffer.

A
lot
stiffer. Like a tornado. A small but powerful vortex that just wrapped itself around Mack, Stefan, and Xiao.

Their hair whipped into their eyes. Their clothing snapped and pressed against them. They had to shout like reporters in a hurricane to be heard. The cloths they'd worn on their heads were torn away and it suddenly occurred to Mack that, whatever was happening here, it probably would have been a good idea to be wearing shoes.

He had tender feet, Mack did.

A fiery line, like molten gold, formed a circle around them on the floor. Mack exchanged a look with the turbanned gentleman, who nodded as if to say, “Yep, that's what happened with the other two.”

And suddenly the Golden Temple was gone. Or to be more accurate, Mack, Stefan, and Xiao were no longer standing in a stiff downdraft in the temple, but were instead standing in ankle-deep water in a lake surrounded by a forest.

It wasn't much of a lake, really. If it was all as shallow as the part they were standing in, it would be easy enough to walk to the shore in any direction. And a bewildered Mack was trying to figure out just which shore would be closest when Stefan said, “Huh.”

Stefan had many variations on “Huh.” This particular version meant something like, “Dude, you better look at this.”

Mack followed the direction of Stefan's stare. And there, on the shore behind them, were about a dozen men on horses. They were rather fantastically costumed (the men, not the horses). Some wore white robes; some looked like they were wearing animal skins; others wore what appeared to be colorful silk.

They had an amazing variety of headgear: tall fur hats that looked like they came from mountain goats, blue turbans, golden scarves, and floppy felt caps. They had amazing sashes, scarves, pennants, and belts.

None were bearded, but almost all had impressive mustaches. They were dark-skinned, similar to Valin, but with faces that wore scars that were clearly from having come too close to bladed weapons. They had bright, alert, slightly crazy eyes.

All of them were armed with a museum's worth of daggers, spears, lances, and swords in scabbards that ranged from simple oxhide to bejeweled masterpieces of the scabbarding art.

Their horses were big, shaggy beasts, often also festooned and bejeweled and spangled. The horses, too, had bright, alert, slightly crazy eyes.

“Those boys,” Stefan said, offering his professional appraisal, “are trouble.”

Almost lost within the scary crew was a reed-thin old man all in green. But you couldn't overlook the person clearly in charge, out in front astride the finest horse: Valin.

Valin looked like he was born on a horse. Maybe he was.

“Welcome, Mack!” Valin cried.

Then Valin drew his sword and yelled an order. The order he yelled was, “Seize them!”

Eight

T
his next part is a bit disturbing. If you are squeamish, maybe you should just skip this chapter. We're about to learn, finally, why Valin hated Mack and what the big issue was between them. And it involves some mild violence, but worse, young love. And worse still, a clown.

But we're not quite there yet. First we have a sudden charge by a dozen armed horsemen brandishing swords and pointing spears. The speed of the attack was such that Xiao hesitated between casting a Vargran spell and changing back to dragon and ended up doing nothing but emitting a frustrated “Oh!” before spears were all up in their faces.

“I have you now!” Valin cried. Then, looking disappointed, he said, “Where is my half sister? Where is Sylvie?”

“Okay, Valin, it's time to have this out!” Mack said.

“Indeed it is! Men: if the girl begins to change, stick a spear in her. And look out for the blond one: he's dangerous.”

Stefan was very pleased to be described as dangerous. Although even he was feeling less than formidable with a spear point pressing into his back and a sword blade at his throat.

“Yemak, Ivan, Stenka, bind them tightly and watch them closely, spears at their throats at all times,” Valin ordered. He was totally in charge. Then as the horsemen were tying Xiao and Stefan, Valin cautioned, “Don't any of you fools get drunk. The man who allows them to escape will deal with my Brembles.”

At this point Mack had no idea what a Bremble was, but he saw the very respectful looks on the faces of these tough guys, and that convinced him that Brembles were not something to be taken lightly.

Mack was snatched up by powerful hands and settled onto the saddle of a horse. A rough rope went around his wrists, a rag was stuffed in his mouth, and suddenly he was racing through the woods as thin branches whipped his face. It was all very exciting in a way. The hoofbeats were a dull thunder; the landscape flashed by; the saddle pounded his butt; a chill breeze froze his wet, bare feet.

Exciting, uncomfortable, and scary. Three things that often go together.

Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout looked extremely uncomfortable. Horseback riding can jar your bones and bruise your butt, and Nine Iron had very old bones and a meatless butt. Also, frankly, he looked ridiculous on a horse.

It occurred to Mack that this would be a good time to lay on some Vargran, if he could get the rag out of his mouth. But he was trying to figure Valin out, trying to bring him over to the side of good and truth and justice and all of that stuff, not destroy him. He needed Valin. The whole world needed Valin.

They rode for an hour through sparse forest and across a number of shallow streams. At last they came upon a circle of tents. The tents were not colorful nylon or even dull canvas. They were large, round, lumpy things made of some kind of skin. Mack hoped it was cowhides and not human skin. Because that would have been disturbing.

One tent was larger than the rest, and Valin, with six of the big, hairy guys, marched Mack, Xiao, and Stefan into that tent.

It smelled of fire, burned meat, and sweat. That last element was supplied by a very large man with a very large mustache. He was naked to the waist and chewing on what might have been a leg of lamb.

Valin spoke some words to the man and pushed Mack to his knees.

“This is Taras Bulba,” Valin said to Mack. “He's an up-and-comer with the Cossacks.”

“Mhhrr hmm hnn hnh,” Mack said. Because he still had a rag in his mouth.

Valin drew his dagger and placed it against Mack's neck. “One word of Vargran and I cut your throat.” He pulled the rag from Mack's mouth.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Blubba.”

“Bulba,” Valin hissed. “Taras Bulba. He and his Cossacks are here to participate in the coming battle between Mukhlis Khan and Guru Hargobind.”

Mack frowned. This felt like the kind of thing that might be on the test. And already he'd forgotten all the names.

“Battle?” he said.

“Yeah, Mughals and Sikhs. With a little help from the Cossacks.”

Taras Bulba seemed to catch the general drift of what was being discussed and he liked battle talk. He drew an amazing scimitar with his free hand and brandished both it and the leg of lamb while yelling something enthusiastic in a language Mack had no chance of ever understanding.

“Taras Bulba was down here guarding a group of Cossack traders, and now it looks like he might get dragged into this war, since the guru's men confiscated his trade goods.”

“What does any of this have to do with . . .” Mack stopped talking and began noticing certain things. For example, he noticed that all of the men in the room, like the men on horses, carried swords. And the tent was made of skins. And there was an open fire.

And he noticed that no one was on a smartphone. No one. When was the last time you saw a dozen people in a skin tent and no one was texting?

Then Mack noticed a person he'd missed at first. She was about his age. She had black hair down to her waist and was dressed in a long robe-like thing. Mack was not a fashion expert. It probably had some better name, but “robe-like thing” was all he could manage.

She was a beautiful girl. She had almond-shaped eyes and a tiny nose and high cheekbones, and her only possible beauty flaw was the fact that she had a noticeable underbite. In other words, her jaw stuck out just a bit too far.

This girl was also not texting. Nor did she have earbuds in.

She was looking hard at Mack.

Mack said, “OMG?”

No flicker of recognition in the girl's eyes.

“BRB?” he said, testing her.

Nothing.

There was only one possible explanation, and it took Mack's breath away. “What year is this?”

Valin laughed. “Very good, Mack. You aren't stupid, I'll say that. You have guessed right: this is not the twenty-first century. We have traveled back in time. This is the year 1634.”

Mack blinked. “What?”

“The year 1634. Where—when, I should say—you will witness the betrayal, the terrible humiliation visited on my family by yours. Do you see that girl?”

“The one with the underbite?”

“That's not fair!” Valin cried. “They didn't have orthodontists yet!”

The outburst drew the attention of Taras Bulba. He smelled trouble, and he liked trouble. Also leg of lamb.

“You dare to insult her?” Valin demanded.

“I didn't mean to I was just—”

“That is Boguslawa Bulba, my great-great-great-great-great—”

“Can we just—”

“Silence! You made me lose count! She is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great . . . How many is that?”

“Seven.”

“Okay, nine more. Sixteen greats in all. Grandmother.”

Just then the tent flap opened and in walked a good-looking lad in breeches and a sheepskin jacket. He had skin as pale as milk, freckles, and curly brown hair.

Something about the curly brown hair seemed familiar to Mack. He felt as if he'd seen it somewhere before.

Like . . . in the mirror.

“And that is your great-great-great-etc.-grandfather,” Valin said poisonously. “Sean Patrick O'Flanagan MacAvoy!”

Taras Bulba spotted the young Irish boy and smiled. He waved him over and gave an affectionate rub to his hair. This had the useful side effect of cleaning some of the leg-o'-lamb grease from Bulba's hands.

“What's he doing here?” Mack asked.

“They're engaged,” Valin said. “Your great-great-great-etc.-grandfather is engaged to marry my great-great-great-etc.-grandmother. But in two days he's going to dump her. She will be so humiliated that she runs away and joins a group of traveling troubadours, jugglers, and actors. This will infuriate Taras Bulba, who will disown Boguslawa. She will end up marrying not Sean Patrick, whose own descendants will be famous warriors and distillers, but a mere performer. And thus will sixteen generations of my family be raised not as descendants of the famous Taras Bulba, Cossack royalty, but rather as the descendants of a random Cossack girl and . . . Izmir. Izmir the Clown.”

“Wait,” Mack said. “That's the reason you're trying to kill me and doom the entire human race to subjugation by the Pale Queen? Because some ancestor of mine dumped some ancestor of yours?”

“You make it sound trivial,” Valin said. “Sixteen generations of humiliation all caused by your family! But I should be Cossack royalty! I could have been a prince!”

 

MEANWHILE, MUCH, MUCH FURTHER BACK IN TIME

The grand opening of the Babylon temple of the Pale Queen was finally at hand. It was a gala day. Which was fine because a gal a day was about all Gil Gamesh could handle, especially when the gal in question was, shall we say, difficult.

“Did you check everything?” Risky demanded. She strode nervously up and down the main aisle of the temple, wringing her hands. “How about the blood gutter? Did you check the slope of the blood gutter? It's really important: too steep and the blood flows by so fast we can't really enjoy it.”

“Yes, yes, for like the tenth time, Risky, I checked the blood gutter. I tested it out. It worked great.”

She spun on her heel, which made her red hair flare out and caused his heart to skip a beat as it always did. “Did you test it with blood or water? Because the viscosity is totally different.”

Risky had figured this out centuries before Isaac Newton even started thinking about it. She was evil, but she was not dumb.

Gil listened patiently to this odd fantasy of Risky's—he thought she often pretended to know things that were patently untrue. Just the other day she had talked about going around the world. Like you could go around a square dinner plate perched on the rear end of Marduk's donkey. I mean, as if.

But even as Gil tried to be patient, Risky's haranguing tone was grinding his last nerve. It had not been easy getting this temple built. Even simple things like measuring a slab of stone could be very difficult—the invention of the tape measure was still thousands of years in the future. They would measure in “feet,” but each foot was slightly different, and after a man's foot had been cut off, it would shrivel up and the toes would curl, so that a “foot” measured with a fresh foot would be different from one measured with a more stale foot.

And with the invention of basic math still far in the future as well, no one could add beyond ten. The temple ended up having to be ten tens of ten feet. Of course in modern times we'd know this was a thousand feet, but back in those days, that would have meant a thousand people hobbling along on just one foot. Or five hundred people crawling without both feet, but that's getting into multiplication and division, and believe me, Gil and the Babylonians were not up for that yet.

Hardest of all was the massive statue of the Pale Queen that would dominate the altar. And that was Gil's special, personal responsibility.

Gil had assembled the finest sculptors from all over Babylon and the nearby kingdoms of Ur of the Chaldees, Um of the Chaldees, Mill Valley, and Hork-Bajir. But since the Pale Queen would not sit for them, they had to operate on Risky's description of her. Risky was not good with descriptions and offered only that her mother was a controlling witch who never let Risky have any fun. As a result, the statue, which stood two hundred hands high (don't even ask), looked a bit like Pikachu (who also would not be invented for thousands of years) but with white hair and a gown made of the tears of children. But Gil thought he'd managed the whole thing pretty well. Probably. And anyway, the Pale Queen would surely be understanding.

Right? he asked himself nervously. Right?

Risky had not seen the final product. It was covered with a cloth—a very big cloth—and awaited the unveiling before the Pale Queen herself.

Now the great day was at last at hand. A thousand sacrificial animals had been stocked in the fenced enclosure outside. Pigs, cows, sheep, unicorns,
30
baboons, auks, rocs, hipsters, hippos, and ducks all waited to be ritually slaughtered for the glory of the Pale Queen.

If that seems harsh, bear in mind that it had taken all of Gil's influence to keep humans out of it, and the truth was, even then, there were a few unfortunates who'd wandered too close and been reclassified as “goats” in order to round out the numbers.

Gil gave Risky a hug. “Don't worry, sweetheart, your mother will love it.”

“I hope so. Because if she doesn't, she'll eat you,” Risky said, giving him a little peck on the cheek.

“Say what now?” Gil asked.

“And did you finish the story you'll be reading to her?”

“The epic?” Gil sighed. “I only hope it lives up to its name. I'm afraid there are some plot holes.”

“Try to clean those up. Mother is a stickler for plots that make sense.”

“Ah. And if she . . .”

“Yes, my love, she'll probably eat you. In fact, there's a pretty good chance that even if everything goes perfectly, she'll eat you.”

This was news to Gil, who was not happy. “Shouldn't you have warned me about this?”

Risky made a pouty face and stabbed an angry finger at the murals that lined the walls. Each of them showed the Pale Queen in one fabulous outfit or another eating various legendary and historical figures: Adam, Eve, Zoroaster, Dagan, Astarte, Noah, and various pharaohs. “It's like you didn't even pay attention to your own artwork!”

“I didn't think it was literal. I thought it was more metaphorical. I thought eating people symbolized, I don't know, the state of a corrupt society.”

“No, she eats people.”

“Some family you have,” Gil snapped.

“Oh, do not go there,” Risky said, waving a scolding finger in his face. “Do not dis my family.”

“Let's not squabble,” Gil said. He tried out his most winning smile, but the truth was, he was feeling a little sick to his stomach. What if it was his own blood in the blood gutter? Would that be irony?
31
He had a lot of plans for the future, and none of them involved being chewed on by a malevolent, demonic goddess.