The Anubis Gates

He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the window bars and, squinting against the steady blast of icy air, peered around for the Romany remnant, but the creature was gone. I hope he went right overboard, he thought—though I guess he wouldn’t sink, just come paddling along after us like a big beetle. The ship was slamming along like a bus racing over a plowed field, but Doyle managed to hold onto the window long enough to glimpse a few figures huddled on the poop deck, evidently trying to get down. At least it’s dispelled the fog, he thought dazedly as he let go of the bars and slid down to a sitting position, blinking his wind-stung and watering eyes.

As time passed, bringing no abatement of the racket or the cold or the continual bouncing, Doyle was thankful that he was in Benner’s body—Doyle’s own had been prone to seasickness—though even in this one he was glad he hadn’t managed to eat any of the lobster salad poor Byron had bought.

* * *

At what must have been about noon a couple of things were pushed through the window bars: a paper-wrapped package, which thumped to the floor and proved to contain salt pork and hard black bread, and a lidded can that fell a few inches and then swung from a little hooked chain; this contained weak beer. Having been snatched away from the food at the Swan, and not eaten before that since lunchtime yesterday, which was longer ago for Doyle than the twenty-four hours that had passed here, he devoured it all with genuine pleasure, even licking the paper wrappings afterward.

About six hours later the procedure was repeated and again he consumed it all. Soon after, it began to get dark—though the wind and the bashing progress of the ship slacked not at all—and he had just gotten around to wondering how he’d sleep, when a couple of blankets were stuffed through the bars.

“Thank you!” he called. “And could I have another beer?” The room was not absolutely dark, and Doyle managed to improvise a good enough bed in his coffin; and as he was about to climb into it he was surprised to hear the beer can chain rattle as it was drawn up—the sluicing of the beer itself was inaudible over the wind shrilling through the harp of the rigging—and then a clank as it fell back into position, full.

He stood up and hurried over to it, and as he stood braced against the wall trying to drink the sloshing beer without spilling any of it he wondered why he was not too alarmed by his position as captive with torture and death in store. Partially, of course, it was the unthinking self-confidence he’d never entirely been without since finding himself in a body so much better than the one he’d been used to; and the balance of his stubborn optimism was based on being, as he was now willing to concede, William Ashbless, who wouldn’t die until ‘46. Watch yourself there, son, he thought. You can be fairly sure you’ll survive, but there’s no reason to assume Ashbless won’t get thoroughly stomped a time or two.

In spite of his predicament he smiled as he searched for a comfortable position, for he was thinking about Elizabeth Jacqueline Tichy, whom he would somehow marry next year—he’d always thought she looked pretty in her portraits.

* * *

The voyage—during which the furious winds never once let up, so that after a couple of days the shambling mariners Doyle could see through his window seemed to have achieved a stunned indifference to them—lasted fifteen days, and in that time Doyle never once saw either Romanelli or the weightless vestige of Doctor Romany. Until an old and overstressed beam in the ceiling of his room developed a long crack on the fourth day, all the captive had done was eat, sleep, peer out the window and try to remember the all too few known facts of Ashbless’ visit to Egypt; after the beam split, he occupied his time pulling down a three-foot splinter and trying, with his teeth and nails, to trim a one-foot length of it into something like a dagger. He considered wrenching the beer can from the bars and flattening it to make a tool, but decided that not only would that deprive him of beer for the rest of the trip, but that anything so noticeable would earn him a search when they arrived.