Desert God (55 page)

I hung back and let them go. ‘Let their separate journeys begin here and end for all of them on the Hills of Happiness,’ I whispered aloud, but my pleasure for them was tempered by my melancholia for my own self: poor lonely Taita. Then I heard a voice that might have been only the evening wind in the treetops.

‘You will never be alone, Taita, for a noble heart is the lodestone which draws to itself the love of others.’

I looked around me in wild amazement and I thought I saw her coming down to me through the forest in her hood and cloak. But the light was fading and I could have been mistaken.

A kingdom built on gold. A legend shattered by greed.

Now the Valley of the Kings lies ravaged by war, drained of its lifeblood as weak men inherit the cherished crown.

In the city of Thebes, at the Festival of Osiris, loyal subjects of the Pharaoh gather to pay homage to their leader. But Taita – a wise and formidably gifted eunuch slave – sees him only as a symbol of a kingdom’s fading glory.

Beside Taita stand his protégés: Lostris, daughter of Lord Intef, beautiful beyond her years; and Tanus, proud, young army officer, who has vowed to avenge the death – at Intef’s hand – of his father, and seize Lostris as his prize. Together they share a dream – to restore the majesty of the Pharaoh of Pharaohs on the glittering banks of the Nile.

THE RIVER lay heavily upon the desert, bright as a spill of molten metal from a furnace. The sky
smoked with heat-haze and the sun beat down upon it all with the strokes of a coppersmith’s hammer. In the mirage the gaunt hills flanking the Nile seemed to tremble to the blows.

Our boat sped close in beside the papyrus beds; near enough for the creaking of the water buckets of the shadoof, on their long, counter-balanced arms, to carry from the fields across the water.
The sound harmonized with the singing of the girl in the bows.

Lostris was fourteen years of age. The Nile had begun its latest flood on the very day that her red woman’s moon had flowered for the first time, a coincidence that the priests of Hapi had
viewed as highly propitious. Lostris, the woman’s name that they had then chosen to replace her discarded baby-name, meant ‘Daughter of the Waters’.

I remember her so vividly on that day. She would grow more beautiful as the years passed, become more poised and regal, but never again would that glow of virgin womanhood radiate from her so
overpoweringly. Every man aboard, even the warriors at the rowing-benches, was aware of it. Neither I nor any one of them could keep our gaze off her. She filled me with a sense of my own
inadequacy and a deep and poignant longing; for although I am a eunuch I was gelded only after I had known the joy of a woman’s body.

‘Taita,’ she called to me, ‘sing with me!’ And when I obeyed she smiled with pleasure. My voice was one of the many reasons that, whenever she was able, she kept me near
her; my tenor complemented her lovely soprano to perfection. We sang one of the old peasant love songs that I had taught her, and which was still one of her favourites:

From the stern another voice joined with ours. It was a man’s voice, deep and powerful, but it lacked the clarity and purity of my own. If my voice was that of a dawn-greeting thrush, then
this was the voice of a young lion.

Lostris turned her head and now her smile shimmered like the sunbeams on the surface of the Nile. Although the man upon whom she played that smile was my friend, perhaps my only true friend,
still I felt the bitter gall of envy burn the back of my throat. Yet I forced myself to smile at Tanus, as she did, with love.

Tanus’ father, Pianki, Lord Harrab, had been one of the grandees of the Egyptian nobility, but his mother had been the daughter of a freed Tehenu slave. Like so many of her people, she had
been fair-headed and blue-eyed. She had died of the swamp fever while Tanus was still a child, so my memory of her was imperfect. However, the old women said that seldom before had such beauty as
hers been seen in either of the two kingdoms.

On the other hand, I had known and admired Tanus’ father, before he lost all his vast fortune and the great estates that had once almost rivalled those of Pharaoh himself. He had been of
dark complexion, with Egyptian eyes the colour of polished obsidian, a man with more physical strength than beauty, but with a generous and noble heart – some might say too generous and too
trusting, for he had died destitute, with his heart broken by those he had thought his friends, alone in the darkness, cut off from the sunshine of Pharaoh’s favour.

Thus it seemed that Tanus had inherited the best from both his parents, except only worldly wealth. In nature and in power he was as his father; in beauty as his mother. So why should I resent
my mistress loving him? I loved him also, and, poor neutered thing that I am, I knew that I could never have her for myself, not even if the gods had raised my status above that of slave. Yet such
is the perversity of human nature that I hungered for what I could never have and dreamed of the impossible.

Lostris sat on her cushion on the prow with her slave girls sprawled at her feet, two little black girls from Cush, lithe as panthers, entirely naked except for the golden collars around their
necks. Lostris herself wore only a skirt of bleached linen, crisp and white as an egret’s wing. The skin of her upper body, caressed by the sun, was the colour of oiled cedar wood from the
mountains beyond Byblos. Her breasts were the size and shape of ripe figs just ready for plucking, and tipped with rose garnets.

She had set aside her formal wig, and wore her natural hair in a side-lock that fell in a thick dark rope over one breast. The slant of her eyes was enhanced by the silver-green of powdered
malachite cunningly touched to the upper lids. The colour of her eyes was green also, but the darker, clearer green of the Nile when its waters have shrunk and deposited their burden of precious
silts. Between her breasts, suspended on a gold chain, she wore a figurine of Hapi, the goddess of the Nile, fashioned in gold and precious lapis lazuli. Of course it was a superb piece, for I had
made it with my own hands for her.

Suddenly Tanus lifted his right hand with the fist clenched. As a single man the rowers checked their stroke and held the blades of their paddles aloft, glinting in the sunlight and dripping
water. Then Tanus thrust the steering-oar hard over, and the men on the port bank stabbed their backstroke deeply, creating a series of tiny whirlpools in the surface of the green water. The
starboard side pulled strongly ahead. The boat spun so sharply that the deck canted over at an alarming angle. Then both banks pulled together and she shot forward. The sharp prow, with the blue
eyes of Horus emblazoned upon it, brushed aside the dense stands of papyrus, and she lanced her way out of the flow of the river and into the still waters of the lagoon beyond.

Lostris broke off the song and shaded her eyes to gaze ahead. ‘There they are!’ she cried, and pointed with a graceful little hand. The other boats of Tanus’ squadron were cast
like a net across the southern reaches of the lagoon, blocking the main entrance to the great river, cutting off any escape in that direction.

Naturally, Tanus had chosen for himself the northern station, for he knew that this was where the sport would be most furious. I wished it was not so. Not that I am a coward, but I have always
the safety of my mistress to consider. She had inveigled herself aboard the
Breath of Horus
only after much intrigue in which, as always, she had deeply involved me. When her father
learned, as he surely would, of her presence in the thick of the hunt, it would go badly enough for me, but if he learned also that I was responsible for allowing her to be in the company of Tanus
for a full day, not even my privileged position would protect me from his wrath. His instructions to me regarding this young man were unequivocal.

However, I seemed to be the only soul aboard the
Breath of Horus
who was perturbed. The others were simmering with excitement. Tanus checked the rowers with a peremptory hand-signal,
and the boat glided to a halt and lay rocking gently upon the green waters that were so still that when I glanced overboard and saw my own reflection look back at me, I was struck, as always, by
how well my beauty had carried over the years. To me it seemed that my face was more lovely than the cerulean blue lotus blooms that framed it. I had little time to admire it, however, for the crew
were all abustle.

One of Tanus’ staff officers ran up his personal standard to the masthead. It was the image of a blue crocodile, with its great coxcombed tail held erect and its jaws open. Only an officer
of the rank of Best of Ten Thousand was entitled to his own standard. Tanus had achieved such rank, together with the command of the Blue Crocodile division of Pharaoh’s own elite guard,
before his twentieth birthday.

Now the standard at the masthead was the signal for the hunt to begin. On the horizon of the lagoon the rest of the squadron were tiny with distance, but their paddles began to beat
rhythmically, rising and falling like the wings of wild geese in flight, glistening in the sunlight. From their sterns the multiple wavelets of their wakes were drawn out across the placid waters
and lay for a long while on the surface, as though moulded from solid clay.

Tanus lowered the gong over the stern. It was a long bronze tube. He allowed the end of it to sink below the surface. When struck with a hammer of the same metal the shrill, reverberating tones
would be transmitted through the water, filling our quarry with consternation. Unhappily for my equanimity, I knew that this could readily turn to a murderous rage.

Tanus laughed at me. Even in his own excitation he had sensed my qualms. For a rude soldier he had unusual perception. ‘Come up here in the stern-tower, Taita!’ he ordered.
‘You can beat the gong for us. It will take your mind off the safety of your own beautiful hide for a while.’

I was hurt by his levity, but relieved by the invitation, for the stern-tower is high above the water. I moved to do his bidding without undignified haste, and, as I passed him, I paused to
exhort him sternly, ‘Have a care for the safety of my mistress. Do you hear me, boy? Do not encourage her to recklessness, for she is every bit as wild as you are.’ I could speak thus
to an illustrious commander of ten thousand, for he was once my pupil and I had wielded the cane on more than one occasion across those martial buttocks. He grinned at me now as he had in those
days, as cocky and impudent as ever.

‘Leave that lady in my hands, I implore you, old friend. There is nothing I would relish more, believe me!’ I did not admonish him for such a disrespectful tone, for I was in some
small haste to take my place in the tower. From there I watched him take up his bow.

Already that bow was famous throughout the army, indeed throughout the length of the great river from the cataracts to the sea. I had designed it for him when he had grown dissatisfied with the
puny weapons that, up until that time, were all that were available to him. I had suggested that we should try to fashion a bow with some new material other than those feeble woods that grow in our
narrow riverine valley; perhaps with exotic timbers such as the heartwood of the olive from the land of the Hittites or of the ebony from Cush; or with even stranger materials such as the horn of
the rhinoceros or the ivory tusk of the elephant.

No sooner had we made the attempt than we came upon a myriad of problems, the first of which was the brittleness of these exotic materials. In their natural state none of them would bend without
cracking, and only the largest and therefore the most expensive elephant tusk would allow us to carve a complete bowstock from it. I solved both these problems by splitting the ivory of a smaller
tusk into slivers and gluing these together in sufficient girth and bulk to form a full bow. Unfortunately it was too rigid for any man to draw.

However, from there it was an easy and natural step to laminate together all four of our chosen materials – olive wood, ebony, horn and ivory. Of course, there were many months of
experimentation with combinations of these materials, and with various types of glue to hold them together. We never did succeed in making a glue strong enough. In the end I solved this last
problem by binding the entire bowstock with electrum wire to prevent it from flying apart. I had two big men assist Tanus in twisting the wire on to it with all their combined strength, while the
glue was still hot. When it cooled, it set to an almost perfect combination of strength and pliability.

Then I cut strands from the gut of a great black-maned lion that Tanus hunted and killed with his bronze-bladed war spear out in the desert. These I tanned and twisted together to form a
bowstring. The result was this gleaming arc of such extraordinary power that only one man out of all the hundreds who had made the attempt could draw it to full stretch.