The Feather on My Scale: Ch 21
Two miles of a hard gallop flew under my mount’s hooves. With every step, I hoped Ptolemy would come into view. The alarms were doing nothing for the bile rising in my throat. On the soft soil and sand, I feared him injuring himself more. Physically fit and stable on the prosthetic I knew at a logical level, but I still saw in my mind’s eye the pain he’d gone through just getting to the point of wearing one, the models he’d worn through, the fact this one still had a squeak in it that indicated an ill-fitting mechanism. I didn’t want him doing damage to his nub. I didn’t want more surgeries.
His broad back shadowed against the Nile Bay horizon and dome panels finally revealed itself to me. Drawing in a muffled sigh of relief, I slowed my mount to a steady trot, then a walk as I pulled up next to him. “Ptolemy? You alright?”
He stood fixated. I turned to study the horizon. A platoon of fishing vessels surrounded a bubbling mass near the far edge of the dome. “What is that?”
Ptolemy, snapping out of his stunned silence looked up at me. “Demons have come.”
“Demons, Ptol? Really? It looks more like a sweep shattered.”
“But…”
“Come with me. Let’s find the Mariner Captain in charge of today’s routings and see what he has to say.”
The colour in his cheeks drained, leaving him papery.
I sagged. “Ptol.”
He quickly tried to neutralize his expression.
“We’ve been through this?”
He dragged in a breath. “I-I know. I know. Fundamentally I know it, Henu.”
“The Cliff War. We were in the wrong. You and I know this, Ptol.”
He bristled. “It doesn’t make it any fucking easier!”
I slid off my mount and grabbed its bridle. “I’m most likely Mariner, Ptolemy! Will you look at me like that when it’s confirmed?”
“You didn’t launch a missile at me!”
“No, but I sure as hell got in your way and got your leg blown off! So what’s the bloody difference between a Mariner and me?”
“I-they-“
“They look like me. I look like them. There’s no difference!”
“I don’t trust them.”
“For what? Protecting themselves when Ramses decided that cleaning out the ghettos around the Bay would be a swell idea to expand the Summer Palace you and I comfortably dined in this evening? For not wanting to be displaced?”
“For trusting the water.”
“You aren’t making sense, Ptol.”
“I could care less about their skin colour. Or their speech patterns. Or most of their culture. But they swim in that water. It’s not clean. It’s from the outside world. It’s contaminated. How do we not know they aren’t in league with the demons living in it?”
“Demons, Ptol?”
“We have no gods of the water. Not deep water. That’s where the demons live.”
I blinked, trying to get a firm grasp on my lover and bodyguard’s rationale. Even he was susceptible to superstitions.
“You can swim, Ptol.”
He swallowed, panic-stricken.
“I’m not asking you to get in the water. You’re escorting me to the docks. You’re not even getting in the ships. I just need to talk to someone and see if whoever’s got a boat out near the sweeps can tell me what’s broken and how to get the damn alarm turned off. You can do that, right, Sucer?”
He thought before nodding slowly.
“Is your leg okay to keep going? Or do you want on the horse?” I offered.
“I can’t have the Pharoah of Hawria come walking into the city with me on a horse. That wouldn’t be proper.” He rubbed at the back of his head, tension seeping out of him as he turned from the panic-stricken junior soldier who had kept me alive in a battlefield neither of us was qualified to be on into the bodyguard I knew him to be. He offered me a mounting hand. I settled into my saddle and tapped its flank to get moving. Ptolemy’s leg squeaked in time with the alarm.
“Why are you hell-bent on thinking I’ll hate you for being Mariner blood?” Ptolemy watched our surroundings as the first shacks emerged from the frontage trees.
“As the lowest caste in the Hawria system, can you blame me? Especially when you act the way you do.”
“You’re afraid of getting assassinated by anti-mariners.”
“Yes.”
Ptolemy plodded along for a time. The horse hooves crunched on dead grasses and loose gravel. The heavy scent of fishing docks hit us in the face as we emerged from the neighbourhoods into the processing district. “Ever since I was young, I grew up on stories of demons. Of people making pacts with them. I haven’t really gotten over that fear.”
“And what of the demons? What would they do to you?” I was trying to figure out why this was still a sticking point.
“Eat me.” He looked up at me like it was the most rational thing to conclude.
“Eat you?” I flattened my tone. “You think there are demons in Nile Bay that want to eat you?”
“Hey, don’t go looking at me like I’ve grown two heads here. Ghost stories from camping trips found you in my tent bed on more than one night, might I remind you.”
“Wasn’t always the ghost stories.”
“Fair. But still, you get scared too.”
“This one just seems like you would have grown out of it.”
“It doesn’t help being paired with some traumatizing experiences.”
“If I promise you that demons aren’t going to come crawling out of the Bay while I’m standing there, can we both talk to the Mariner Captain and get him to turn the alarm off? House of Thoth said they’d know where the button is.”
“Nour?”
“Yes, him. Forgot his name.”
Ptolemy guided the horse toward a large, low red building perched into the cliff face that looked out onto the main piers of the fishing platoon. Dismounting, I straightened my clothes as sunrise peaked through the dome and cast us in a rainbow of pinks and purples.
Ptolemy hitched my mount to a post in time for an ancient man to hobble out of the red building. Weathered and whithered, the man stooped nearly in half. A short stick carved with a plethora of fish provided his only support. A cracked, high-pitched voice that comes with men in old age scratched the air. “Hawria King? Whats to bring ya here?”
“Mariner Captain?” I guessed. He nodded mutely. “I’ve come to see if you can shut the alarm off and what has become of the sweeps?”
The Mariner Captain frowned, shaking his head. “Not the sweeps, Hawria King. Not the sweeps fault. The alarm may be dealt with soon. Yet, the sweeps are not the fault.”
“Then what is causing the bubbling.” I pointed out to the crowd of ships fighting to stay afloat amongst the roiling turmoil.
He frowned, watching the bubbles. “Never seen this before, Hawria King. Not in eighty-five years of my memory.”
My heart sank at that.
“Demons…” Ptolemy whispered.
The Mariner Captain chuckled at my bodyguard. “Demons? You still believing in our boogeymen? We use those stories to keep kiddies from drowning in tide pools.”
The indignant realization of what that meant splashed across Ptolemy’s face like cold water. “Boogeymen stories?”
The Mariner Captain’s chuckle turned into a wheezing cackle. “Oh, it’s been years since I had a grown man whisper about water demons. Aye, those are children’s stories! If’n ye don’t scare the shit out a’ little mischief makers, ye have to go telling their mam the little sprite went n’ offed ’emselves in a riptide. None a’ us wanna to be doin’ ‘at.”
Ptolemy looked down at his feet sheepishly. I wanted to pat him on the shoulder, but decorum dictated otherwise.
“Can you pull up someone out there on a com and find out more about the water? Why it’s doing that?”
“Aye.” The Mariner Captain waved me to follow him into the low, red building. Inside, the thick mud and cool cliffside made for a comfortable, dim respite from the glare of the dome. A wall of ancient tech gave me a strange jitter of anxiety. We had lost most of the understanding to use the equipment in the Nobility and Temple. Save for coms. Those were kept functional. Otherwise, the consoles built into the thick walls looked more like magical alters than the Cliff Temple’s sacrificial golden alter where yearly a blood sacrifice was made to Re.
The man motioned to three mariner youth to contact the fishing vessels. Soft brown, almost greyish in tone, their skin was only darker than mine by a hint. Curly hair like Wash and mine was beaded with different colours in complex patterns that looked like fishing nets. Their bright purple floor length tunics with white belts designated them as upper Mariners, ones trained to read and write. Their dialect escaped me as they made contact with several ships. Ptolemy and I shared a glance before a clatter of claxons and horns announced more chaos.
A massive prow twice the size of the shipping fleet burst through the bubbling mess, sweeps and part of the bay dome over the water shattering. Terror hit me as I grabbed the com off Ptolemy’s collar. Yanking the battery cover off, I pressed the blue button above the battery. “Seal off Nile Bay. Seal off Nile Bay. The Dome has been breached. I repeat, as Pharaoh, the God-King of Hawria, seal off Nile Bay!” I screamed.
A new set of alarms and the growling of steel structure merged with the rest of the noise. Massive plastic curtains much further inland unfurled from the dome beams. Much too slowly for my taste the sheets descended until they crumpled over houses and trees, crushing structures. I knew I had trapped Ptolemy and myself in what was about to become a toxic dead zone. I had trapped everyone in the bay side Mariners ghetto with me. Slowly my actions sank into my bones. Catching Ptolemy’s startled look, I returned it with one begging for forgiveness. The air system whirled as the plastic sheets began the time-intensive process of inflating to create a hull breach seal. Swallowing, I muttered to myself, “Forgive me for those I take to the Duat for my actions.”
Chapel Orahamm (C) 2022-2024. All Rights Reserved.
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