Mercury Shrugs by Robert Kroese

Author:Robert Kroese [Kroese, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westmarch Publishing
Published: 2016-04-26T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

We can only speculate as to what happened to the shard after it left Nisroc’s hands. The most likely scenario appears to be something like this:

Three members of the tribe known as the Pistons had been stalking Mercury’s group for some time, finally seizing on their chance to attack when most of the group disappeared through the portal. Perhaps they knew Nisroc had the shard and killed him to get it back; perhaps they were just grumpy after a day-long trek through the desert. In either case, they took the shard and left Nisroc for dead, unaware that he would in short order recover physically, if not emotionally, from his ordeal.

Unfortunately for the three Pistons, on the way back to their village they encountered a hungry lion, which devoured a significant portion of their party along with the shard itself. The lion was later injured in an inconclusive struggle with a bull elephant and limped off to die alone of starvation. Its body was picked apart by vultures, one of whom swallowed the shard.

The vulture survived for several weeks with the shard in its belly, but the added weight eventually made it easy prey for a crocodile while the bird was bathing in the headwaters of the Nile. The crocodile carried bird’s carcass in its belly, along with the shard, all the way to the Nile delta, where it was attacked by hunters. The crocodile escaped after suffering a fatal blow from a spear; it sank to the bottom of the river where its corpse slowly rotted over the next several months. The shard remained on the bottom of the delta for the next three hundred years.

During an uncharacteristic drought one year, the waters in the delta receded enough that a child playing in the river spotted the shard. He swam down to recover it. Realizing it was very valuable, the child ran to bring the shard to his father, but in his excitement he tripped on a tree root and fell on his face, dropping the shard. The shard was picked up by a passing merchant, who insisted he had bought the shard from a street vendor in Khartoum. As there were no witnesses to the contrary, the merchant’s claim was sustained.

That night, however, the child’s father broke into the merchant’s home to recover the shard. The merchant awoke and put up a struggle; the child’s father killed him and ran with the shard. He was apprehended shortly by a soldier, who delivered the shard to the local strong man-cum-mayor. At the time, a young prince was attempting to unify the towns in the area into a single kingdom, and the strong man-cum-mayor, fearing attack from the neighboring provinces, gave the shard to the prince in an effort to buy his protection.

The shard remained in the prince’s family for seven generations, while his small kingdom gradually grew to encompass most of modern-day Egypt. The prince’s great-great-great-great-grandson was buried with the shard in an elaborate tomb protected with all manner of traps, ruses, hidden doors, and truly stomach-churning curses.

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