9. Hounds and Jackals

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During the next several days, Seti found and delivered five stars to the beach camp. 

The soldiers no longer pushed him forward like a prisoner, but kept a certain respectful distance, waiting for him to get going on his own. He guessed from their actions and reactions that word had got around about the strange things that happened every time he found a new star and they weren't taking any chances.  

He still had no idea how he was doing it. He simply walked around until bizarre things began to happen. 

The first time it had been the little gods, but then he'd talked backwards and another time the ground around the star had appeared to be on fire, but he hadn't felt anything as he'd walked through the flames. It had seemed like nothing more than a false picture in his mind to him, but the soldiers, superstitious as they were, obviously thought differently. 

Only the first -- and the last-- star had spoken to him. 

Through the last one, Seti knew just how far beyond his limited horizons the plot -- and counterplot -- reached. Like in a game of Hounds and Jackals, he could see how they had been biting and growling at each others' heels for decades, unable to leverage more than a temporary advantage in all that time. Both sides were becoming frustrated.  Frustrated and desperate.

The new stars were to change all that, reshuffle the figures on the playing board. The question was: which side would get their hands on them first?  That, he had no answer for. 

"Why tell me all this?" he'd whispered into the shiny, bubbled surface of the last star as he knelt next to it on the jungle floor. "What do you want me of all people to do?"

Do what you do. Watch. Listen. Coordinate. The Sky Goddess has raised you in rank. You are now free to know what you will.  

"And if I don't want to know about any of it?"

Watch. Listen. Coordinate. You were selected by the Sky Goddess for her plan.

Neb-ka had greeted the delivery of the first star with a look of dumbfounded astonishment as the scavenging party broke from the tree line and onto the beach, a star the size of a one-year- old child swinging in the transportation net. 

The white scar running up the side of his face had taken on a pinkish hue and he'd almost tripped the soldiers carrying the poles in his eagerness to finally lay eyes on the gift from the heavens. But that eagerness had quickly melted into suspicion. He'd pointed his fly whip at Seti and threatened him with yet another picturesque death if he was attempting a trick.

"No fake, your Majesty," the leader of the soldiers said after the prince's tirade had calmed. "We made sure. Very sure. It's a star all right."

After that, Neb-ka had kept his threats to a minimum, simply nodding as each star emerged from the jungle. 

All that didn't surprise Seti in the least. According to the whisperings, Neb-ka believed himself to be one of the ring leaders of the counterplot, when in fact, he was little more than a peg on their game board. He was blind to the ropes and cogs moving his mouth and feet, entirely focused as he was on the thin threads of power bundled in his own fists. He was exactly as incapable of independent action as the stone statues of the gods the priests manipulated for the peasants on high holy days. 

And just as useful. 

Neb-ka was of minor importance. But that didn't mean he wasn't dangerous. 

The fire-blackened Babylonian ships, the skeletal hulls of which jutted up out of the ocean water a little ways from the shore were a silent testimony to that. As were the occasional screams and cheers that carried over the tops of the strange forests to where Seti wandered in the hills, waiting to stumble over a star.

The Egyptian fleet left the island diminishing in their foamy wake a week and a half after their arrival, six stars riding along with them in protected transport lockers. 

Seti hadn't been overly pleased to see two of the stars being loaded onto his own ship, but at least they weren't the ones that spoke. 

He was acutely aware that he possessed enough secret information to get himself murdered several times over and he was beginning to believe what the Babylonian leader had relayed from his god. The stars were too powerful. They would sow discord and disaster wherever they appeared and the best thing for everyone was to destroy them.

He could easily foresee what would happen should one or the other plot come into possession of all of the stars at once - and it wasn't good. But all he could do was sit and watch from the sidelines. 

The solar turbines vibrated the wooden walls of the cabin as they propelled the ship forward, back through the thin causeway flanked by cliffs that marked the entrance to the Great Green, and then out into calmer, more tranquil waters. 

The journey would be over in a few more days, but the nightmares could easily follow him for the rest of his life. He knew they were caused by being in constant proximity to the stars, and that even there he was powerless. He was trapped with them, an open channel for their radiated energy

Bleary-eyed and slightly dizzy, the nightmare visions crept into his conscious even as he tried to avoid them, showing him horrific images regardless of if his eyes were closed or not. He slept, and didn't sleep. 

In the half-world between dreaming and waking, he saw carts that moved on their own, controlled by the mind of the person inside. He saw men made of beaten copper, unable to be injured or killed, swing weapons and bashing in the skulls of human men. He saw lances thrown so far, they were no longer visible and objects levitating, only to drop onto the heads of the unsuspecting, killing them with ease. 

He knew that in the right hands, the stars nestled in their lockers only a few paces away from where he lay, could make all these visions a reality. 

He remembered the floating, moving, copper ball in the shrine chamber and understood now that it was no slight of hand, no trick. He had been offered a weak glimpse of the actual power of the stars and had not believed it. 

The only one playing fair with him had been the Sky Goddess, and that from the very start. Everything else had been clever falsehoods and scheming. 

He didn't know who to trust. 

And just when he thought the darkness behind his eyes held no more surprises, that the horror couldn't go on any further, Seti began to dream of the foreign kings. . . 

He dreamt a small, pale-skinned man with huge ambition would come to Egypt to conquer, leaving behind a hoard of men to destroy her temples and monuments in the name of learning. They would find Seti's private scrolls, but would be unable to read them, and would place them in archives in the subterranean vaults of a fortress their own land. But not so the fragment of star that the small, pale man would find and keep with him for sentimental reasons. That fragment would make him Pharaoh of his country, raising him up like a star himself, and assist in his spectacular downfall and death. Which, fittingly, would occur on a small island. 

He dreamt of second small, pale-skinned man also gifted with huge ambition, who would be able to read his scrolls, and on the basis of them would send a fox in the guise of a man to the deserts of Egypt in search of the stars. That small, pale man would believe they would make him not the king he already was, but Pharaoh over vast territories. The fox and his army would only be able to locate a few shards, but that would be enough to kill more people than Seti ever thought could exist before arranging the downfall and death of the Pharaoh and the violent collapse of his kingdom. Which, fittingly, would be ruled under a symbol that looked like a black revolving star. 

And finally,  he dreamt of third small, pale-skinned man gifted with huge ambition who would be able to bring most of the surviving shards together, believing he could cure the world of its ills with them. He would become the ruler of an intangible empire that existed through box-like devices connected by visible and invisible ropes that would criss-crossed the world. The stars would make him Pharaoh of this unseen empire -- allowing him to rule and bend every nation to his will, eventually causing wars and famines  -- until he believed he was a Sky God himself and the Earth no longer good enough. He would build an engine that would allow him to ride into the sky and he would die there. Which, fittingly, would happen in an attempt to live on a red jewel of a star that twinkled seductively in the night sky. 

That third man would take the shards with him, returning them to the body of the Sky Goddess. But a few would still remain on Earth, in Egypt, hidden and waiting for more ambitious men to come digging for them, burning with a desire to become Pharaohs themselves.

And the cycle would continue. 

Seti didn't know if he should trust the dreams. Were they reality, or distortions created in his own mind?  Was he seeing a future time, or wild concoctions of the same story over and over again? 

He didn't know and he didn't want to know. The kings had nothing to do with him, although the dreams clearly showed it was his scrolls and his words that would lead some of them to believe what they did. What was going to happen in the coming days, months and years? Would any of what he'd been shown actually come about or was it only possibility?

Watch. Listen. Coordinate

It dawned on Seti as he sat in the darkness of his cabin, fingers entwined and ill-at-ease, why exactly he'd been chosen. Really chosen. Not by the ambitious men who thought they'd plucked him out of obscurity for their own use, but by the Sky Goddess. 

All progress was inevitable loss. 

That was the horrible gift of the Sky to the Earth. A gift of ambition, expansion, dominance, over-expansion, corruption and downfall. 

The rise and fall of a series of deadly stars.  

And all of it spurred on by the finding of the six that he, Seti, son of Ramu, had been sent to bring back.

As small and insignificant as he was. And so utterly, utterly lacking in ambition himself.

Seti turned over on his sleeping mat, never having felt more alone in his life. 

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A/N The photo at the top shows the Ancient Egyptian board game "Hounds and Hares" which was a fairly popular game in pharaonic Egypt, although not as popular as Senet. Hounds and Hares was an early, card-less form of the game of cribbage and bears some resemblance to Parcheesi / Pachisi.  





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