Sting of the Scorpion (2 page)

The moon-god, Thoth, finally climbed into the sky. Ramose was pleased to see the bright disc of the moon. Thoth was also the ibis-headed god of writing, worshipped by scribes. Thoth was only there for a moment before the black sky turned dark orange. The first rays of the sun were appearing over the horizon. Before long the sky was light and the moon faded until it was like a ghost of itself in the morning sky.

Karoya awoke and sat up. Hapu stirred in his sleep. Ramose realised with a jolt that he wasn’t dreaming. He was awake. The pain in his leg from Wersu’s blow was unbearable. The itching hadn’t gone away. And try as he might, he could not swallow the fig jammed into his mouth. He tried to speak to Karoya, but he could only make a terrible animal noise.

Karoya knelt down at his side. Her forehead was creased with concern. She seemed to be shuddering and quivering from side to side. Then Ramose realised that it was him that was moving. He was shivering violently and couldn’t stop.

“Hapu,” said Karoya. “Quick, get the water.”

Hapu sat up sleepily. As soon as he saw Ramose he jumped to his feet.

“What’s happened to him?”

“I don’t know, but he needs water. His tongue is so swollen, it looks like he might choke.”

What’s wrong with me? Ramose wanted to ask as he gulped the water, but he couldn’t. He had never felt so sick. He was sweating as if he were lying out in the midday sun, but the sun’s rays hadn’t yet reached their camp. He couldn’t breathe properly. He sucked in gulps of air. His heart was pounding. Karoya was swimming blurredly in front of him.

Ramose felt her hands as she searched his body for signs of injury or illness. She touched his right leg and he cried out in pain.

“Here,” said Karoya. “Look. Something has bitten him.”

Karoya pulled the cloak away from him. Ramose raised his heavy head and glimpsed his lower leg, which was swollen to the size of a melon. He might have imagined the vizier hitting him with a statue, but the pain was real.

Karoya suddenly snatched up her grinding stone. Ramose flinched as she held it above her head ready to hurl at him. He tried to cry out again. Not you, Karoya. You haven’t turned against me, have you? No sound came out, but saliva dribbled from his mouth as if he were a baby. He felt a rush of air as the stone narrowly missed his leg and dug into the sand next to him. What is happening? he wanted to ask. Ramose felt his eyelids droop. His life was in danger, he didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t, but all he wanted to do was sleep. Karoya knelt down and picked up something very cautiously between her fingers. Ramose’s vision was blurry, but he could make out what it was. It was a dead scorpion.

Ramose opened his eyes. A man with a thin, grim face and a small, straight mouth was looking down at him.

For a moment, Ramose thought that it was Wersu. Then he realised that the face was burnt dark brown and creased like old leather. It was framed by a piece of dark cloth wrapped around the man’s head. His black, piercing eyes were bright like a bird’s, nothing like the vizier’s. As the man reached across to feel Ramose’s brow, the boy felt the coarse cloth of a thick, long-sleeved garment scrape against his arm. The man smelt bad, as if he had not bathed for a very long time.

The pain in Ramose’s leg was still there, but he wasn’t itchy any more. The man held a gourd to Ramose’s mouth. Ramose drank from it. The liquid was thick and tasted something like milk, but it was nothing like the milk from cattle or gazelles. It tasted like someone’s feet had been washed in it.

Then the man disappeared from Ramose’s view. He heard an unintelligible shout and then felt movement. His body was jolted and jarred, as if he were lying on something that was being dragged along the ground.

A piece of coarse, hairy cloth was stretched above him to provide shade from the sun. He could feel the warmth penetrating the cloth. Ramose turned his head to see where he was. Under the edges of the shade cloth he could see nothing but sand.

There was a strong animal smell, so unpleasant it made him feel sick. All around him were animal noises—some that sounded familiar, others that didn’t sound like any animal he’d ever known. There were other unfamiliar sounds, irregular clinkings and clankings. His body rocked and lurched as he was pulled along by something unseen.

Ramose was comfortable, despite all the bumping and the smells. He could feel a strong, cool pressure on his right leg, as if there were something heavy weighing down on it. The pain was still there, but it seemed to be somewhere else, as if someone had taken it out and put it down at a distance.

Ramose didn’t know where he was going or who was taking him there, but at that moment he didn’t care.

He woke again. He was still bumping along. He smelt the strong smell of fresh animal dung. He heard voices, strange sounds made in the back of the throat. The voices made no sense, though. The unknown animal joined in. Ramose tried to sit up but he couldn’t. Then the movement stopped. Everything was still.

The shade cloth was suddenly thrown back and there stood Karoya. She was looking down at him with the same crinkled look of concern as when he’d last seen her. Ramose’s tongue had shrunk back to something like normal size. He thought he would try and speak.

“Hello, Karoya.” His words were a little slurry, but Karoya’s black face was suddenly split by a brilliant white crescent as she smiled down at him.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Better,” he said. “I saw a strange man.”

“That was Zeyd.”

Ramose tried to sit up, but couldn’t move his arms or legs. He raised his head and saw the reason why he was unable to move. He was tied to a sort of sled.

“Have we been captured by barbarians?” he asked.

Karoya smiled again as she undid the knots. “No. You are tied onto the sled, so you don’t fall off.”

He looked up past Karoya’s bent head and saw what had been pulling his sled.

“I must be still dreaming,” he said, as he stared at the strangest creature he had seen in his entire life.

“No, you’re not,” said Karoya, as she helped him to sit up.

Ramose stared at the creature. It was the biggest animal he’d ever seen. It towered above him. It had large hoofed feet, skinny legs and matted brown hair. On the end of a long, curved neck was the ugliest face imaginable. A big-lipped mouth full of large, yellow teeth moved from side to side as it chewed on some dried grass. Strangest of all, on the creature’s back was a large hump.

“What is that?” asked Ramose, unable to tear his eyes away from the ugly creature.

“It is called a camel,” said Karoya knowledgeably, holding a gourd of milk to Ramose’s lips.

“Why does the milk taste so strange?” he asked.

“It’s camel’s milk.”

As Ramose sipped the milk, he looked around and took in his new surroundings. He didn’t have to ask where they were—he could see. They were deep in the desert. Whichever way he looked he could see nothing but sand.

It was not the desert along the edges of the fertile land that he and his friends had been travelling in. There were no rocky outcrops, no occasional tufts of grass. There was no sound of insects, no birds flying overhead. In every direction all he could see was sand—hard flat sand and its surface rippled like a wind-blown pond. A group of grubby children was standing staring at Ramose.

Ramose whispered to Karoya. “Are you sure we aren’t captives?”

Karoya laughed. “No, we are guests. Honoured guests. These people are nomads. Zeyd is their chief. They travel from oasis to oasis to graze their goats. And you don’t have to whisper, Ramose. They have their own language and they don’t understand a word of Egyptian.”

“How do you know so much about them? Can you speak their language?”

“I don’t have to speak to them,” said Karoya, laughing again. “This is the way my family lived before the Egyptians came.” It had been a long time since Ramose had heard her laugh so much.

The nomads were strange-looking people. There were three dark men, all like the one who had leaned over him, all wearing long-sleeved, hairy coats that came down to their ankles. They had pieces of dark cloth wrapped around their heads.

There were also five women and some children. The women had patterns tattooed in dark blue on their faces. They wore heavy beaded necklaces and bracelets. They had rings, not on their fingers, but pierced through their ears and noses. The children were tending a herd of about twenty goats, giving them dry grass from a sack.

It was the strangest sight Ramose had ever seen, but strangest of all was the camel creature. It carried leather saddlebags and rolls of cloth. Large terracotta jars and metal cooking pots hung on either side of the animal’s strange humped back.

Ramose realised it was the animal’s strong smell that he had smelt as he was pulled behind it. The strange sounds he’d heard were the jars and pots knocking against each other.

Ramose watched as the people made their camp in the desert. They stuck sticks into the sand and draped heavy cloth over them, holding down the edges with stones. In less than an hour there was a comfortable little village: four cloth houses and a cooking fire.

“Don’t they want to know who we are, what we’re doing?” asked Ramose.

“No. Desert people welcome all travellers.” Karoya’s eyes shone. “Anyone who comes to their camp is made welcome and given food.”

Ramose thought that the children would have been more interested in their strange guests, but they were all huddled around something, laughing and squealing. One of them stood up with the object of their fascination in his arms. It was Mery.

“They have never seen a cat before,” Karoya said. “They had never even heard of such a creature.”

One little girl, who was no more than four, reached out slowly to the cat. She touched the fur and Mery miaowed. The little girl jumped back in terror. Ramose found it hard to believe that the children could be frightened of a little cat, yet they played happily at the feet of the monster animal they called camel.

“I have never heard of camels,” said Ramose.

“It is from a far distant place where there are many such creatures,” Karoya explained. “Zeyd won the creature in a fight with the chief of an enemy tribe. The camel doesn’t need to drink like other animals. Zeyd believes that it stores water in the hump on its back. He wishes that he had more camels.”

“I thought you said you didn’t speak their language.”

“I don’t. Zeyd explained with his voice and his hands and pictures in the sand.”

Ramose inspected his leg, which was bandaged in coarse cloth and squashed under a heavy stone. He lifted off the stone and unwrapped his leg.

“The weight of the stone stopped the poison from spreading to other parts of your body,” Karoya explained.

Large leaves were pressed into the area where he’d been stung. Ramose gently removed them.

“These look like lotus leaves,” he said.

“They are. They stop the pain. The leaves are very precious to desert people because they are hard to get. The lotus plant is very useful. There was some powdered lotus in the milk you drank as well.”

Ramose’s lower leg was still swollen and there were two puncture marks in his calf.

“The poison in desert scorpions is strong and you were stung twice. If the nomads had not appeared out of the desert,” Karoya said quietly, “I think you would have died.”

The nomad women lit a small fire using dried palm fronds and dung just as Karoya did. Hapu helped Ramose to his feet and led him to the fire. There was the smell of roasting goat’s meat and baking bread. Ramose’s stomach growled. It had been weeks since he’d eaten properly.

As soon as the sun dropped below the horizon, it got cold, colder than Ramose had ever known it to be in Egypt. He shivered, even though he was sitting as close as possible to the flames.

Zeyd, the man he had seen earlier, said something to one of the women. She disappeared inside a tent and returned with warm clothes for the guests. Ramose gratefully pulled on a long, hairy garment similar to the other men’s—a dark, heavy coat that reached the ground. From the smell of it, Ramose guessed it was made of woven goat hair. He was getting used to the strong smell of goats already, and it was good to feel warm.