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Then I won't.''
    ''Fine.''
    Steven was a little more careful from then on, however. He flouted the school rules whenever possible and was a regular visitor to the headmaster's study and the regular bearer of the stripes of a good arse-thrashing. But he never again trespassed on the unwritten codes which the pupils themselves lived by. And after David left for university Steven prospered in his own way, setting himself up as a black marketeer and trafficking lucratively in such prohibited items as cigarettes, alcohol, and porn. He smuggled the contraband into school and sold it at inflated prices, and David often wondered what their father would have done if he'd ever found out. Would he have punished Steven, or congratulated him on his entrepreneurialism? Profit, after all, was what drove Jack Westwynter on. It was his pole star, his compass. It gave him a sense of direction, and David's own sense of direction was hopelessly confused. He should be heading west. He thought he was. But the sun would not stay still in the sky. It kept turning around, pirouetting, dancing tantalisingly. When it ought to be behind him, suddenly it was in front. When it ought to be directly overhead, suddenly it was somewhere to his left or right.
    Ra's Solar Barque was no longer cruising in a straight line across the heavens. Someone was asleep at the tiller.
    So David thought, although a precise voice deep inside him wanted him to know that the Solar Barque was sailing as true as ever. He was the one meandering, straying, circling. His course was wayward. Steven's course was wayward. He didn't do as David did and join the family firm. A seat on the board of AW Games had been waiting for David the moment he stood up from the exam-room desk having completed the last of his finals. He'd been welcomed in by the company executives. They'd said they had high hopes for him. A sound brain. His father's son. A chip off the old block. They were looking forward to working with him.
    Steven, on the other hand, shunned further education and joined the navy.
    He joined the navy because there was a war on and the armed services needed able bodies and the Parent Hegemony needed defending. Or so he said.
    But it was obvious that he did it because it was the exact opposite of what everyone expected him to do and wished him to do.
    Six months later, following the Battle of the Aegean, Steven was listed as missing in action.
    Just as David would be. Probably was already.
    He sat on a rocky outcrop overlooking a valley that was wide and brown, shot with pink by the rays of the setting sun. A bird wheeled above, wings outstretched, riding the evening thermals. At first David had taken it for a Saqqara Bird and had felt a faint stab of hope. Even now, some priest back in Cyprus was coming round from a fever-trance and informing David's superiors that he had found him. The army hadn't written him off after all. The government might have ordered Petra to be bombed but the Second Paratroop Regiment had refused to give up on its men.
    But the bird was in fact a real bird, a vulture, and it was here for only one reason.
    David felt empty. There was nothing left inside him. He was a shell, a brittle man-shaped crust enclosing a vast, exhausted void. He had gone as far as he was able to. There was no more distance to go.
    He knew it. The vulture knew it too.
    The Horusite ba lance lay across his lap. He was trying to summon up his last dregs of strength in order to pick up the weapon and place it against his head.
    Gibbs had been right. There was no other way out. Death was inevitable. But at least, like this, you had some control over it. You could decide the when and the where and the snap-of-the-fingers how.
    The life beyond awaited. In Iaru, the Field of Reeds, David would plough, sow, and harvest for all eternity. He would toil happily, with Steven beside him. There would be no more turmoil and dispute between the two of them. They would be as they were always meant to