Pyramids

could grab when you were fleeing from persecution,” said Teppic, anxious to show an understanding nature.
    Khuft took another fig and gave him a lopsided look. “How’s that again?”
    “You were being persecuted,” said Teppic. “That’s why you fled into the desert.”
    “Oh, yes. You’re right. Damn right. I was being persecuted for my beliefs.”
    “That’s terrible,” said Teppic.
    Khuft spat. “Damn right. I believed people wouldn’t notice I’d sold them camels with plaster teeth until I was well out of town.”
    It took a little while for this to sink in, but it managed it with all the aplomb of a concrete block in a quicksand.
    “You’re a criminal !” said Teppic.
    “Well, criminal’s a dirty word, know what I mean?” said the little ancestor. “I’d prefer entrepreneur. I was ahead of my time, that’s my trouble.”
    “And you were running away?” said Teppic weakly.
    “It wouldn’t,” said Khuft, “have been a good idea to hang about.”
    “‘And Khuft the camel herder became lost in the Desert, and there opened before him, as a Gift from the Gods, a Valley flowing with Milk and Honey,’” quoted Teppic, in a hollow voice. He added, “I used to think it must have been awfully sticky.”
    “There I was, dying of thirst, all the camels kicking up a din, yelling for water, next minute—whoosh—a bloody great river valley, reed beds, hippos, the whole thing. Out of nowhere. I nearly got knocked down in the stampede.”
    “No!” said Teppic. “It wasn’t like that! The gods of the valley took pity on you and showed you the way in, didn’t they?” He shut up, surprised at the tones of pleading in his own voice.
    Khuft sneered. “Oh, yes? And I just happened to stumble across a hundred miles of river in the middle of the desert that everyone else had missed. Easy thing to miss, a hundred miles of river valley in the middle of a desert, isn’t it? Not that I was going to look a gift camel in the mouth, you understand, I went and brought my family and the rest of the lads in soon enough. Never looked back.”
    “One minute it wasn’t there, the next minute it was?” said Teppic.
    “Right enough. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
    “No,” said Teppic. “No. Not really.”
    Khuft poked him with a wrinkled finger. “I always reckoned it was the camels that did it,” he said. “I always thought they sort of called it into place, like it was sort of potentially there but not quite, and it needed just that little bit of effort to make it real. Funny things, camels.”
    “I know.”
    “Odder than gods. Something the matter?”
    “Sorry,” said Teppic, “it’s just that this is all a bit of a shock. I mean, I thought we were really royal. I mean, we’re more royal than anyone .”
    Khuft picked a fig seed from between two blackened stumps which, because they were in his mouth, probably had to be called his teeth. Then he spat.
    “That’s up to you,” he said, and vanished.
    Teppic walked through the necropolis, the pyramids a saw-edged skyline against the night. The sky was the arched body of a woman, and the gods stood around the horizon. They didn’t look like the gods that had been painted on the walls for thousands of years. They looked worse. They looked older than Time. After all, the gods hardly ever meddled in the affairs of men. But other things were proverbial for it.
    “What can I do? I’m only human,” he said aloud.
    Someone said, Not all of you .

    Teppic awoke, to the screaming of seagulls.
    Alfonz, who was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and the expression of one who never means to take it off again, ever, was helping several other men unfurl one of Unnamed’s sails. He looked down at Teppic in his bed of rope and gave him a nod.
    They were moving. Teppic sat up, and saw the dock-side of Ephebe slipping silently away in the gray morning light.
    He stood up unsteadily, groaned, clutched at his head, took a run and dived over the rail.

    Heme Krona, owner of the Camels-R-Us livery stable, walked slowly around You Bastard, humming. He examined the camel’s knees. He gave one of its feet an experimental kick. In a swift movement that took You Bastard completely by surprise he jerked open the beast’s mouth and examined his great yellow teeth, and then jumped away.
    He took a plank of wood from a heap in the corner, dipped a brush in a pot of black paint, and after a moment’s thought carefully wrote, O NE O WNER .
    After some further