Текст книги "River god"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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  The wagon at the rear of the column that carried the lighter wooden coffin was followed by a regiment of Shil-luk. Their magnificent voices carried clearly to us at the head of the column as they sang the last farewell. I knew that Tanus would hear them and know for whom the song was sung.

  WHEN WE AT LAST REACHED THE VALLEY of the tomb, the golden coffin was placed beneath a tabernacle outside the entrance to the royal mausoleum. The linen roof of the tent was illuminated with texts and illustrations from the Book of the Dead.

  There were to be two separate funerals. The first was the lesser, that of the Great Lion of Egypt. The second would be the grander and more elaborate royal funeral.

  So it was that three days after our arrival at the valley, the wooden coffin was placed in the tomb that I had prepared for Tanus, and the tomb was consecrated by the priests of Horus, who was Tanus' patron, and then sealed.

  During this ritual, my mistress was able to restrain her grief and to show nothing more than the decent sorrow of a queen towards a faithful servant, although I knew that inside her something was dying that would never be reborn.

  All that night the valley resounded to the chant of the Shilluk regiment as they mourned for the man who had now become one of their gods. To this day they still shout his name in battle.

  Ten days after the first funeral, the golden coffin was placed on its wooden sledge and dragged into the vast royal tomb. It required the efforts of three hundred slaves to manoeuvre the coffin through the passageways. I had designed the tomb so precisely that there was only the breadth of a hand between the sides and the lid of the coffin and the stone walls and roof.

  To thwart all future grave-robbers and any others who would desecrate the royal tomb, I had built a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the mountain. From the entrance in the cliff-face, a wide passage led directly to an impressive burial vault that was decorated with marvellous murals. In the centre of this room stood an empty granite sarcophagus, with the lid removed and cast dramatically aside. The first grave-robber to enter here would believe that he was too late and that some other had plundered the tomb before him.

  In fact, there was another tunnel leading off at right-angles from the entrance passage. The mouth of this was disguised as a store-room for the funerary treasure. The coffin had to be turned and eased into this secondary passage. From there it entered a maze of false passages and dummy burial vaults, each'more serpentine and devious than the last.

  In all there were four burial chambers, but three of these would remain forever empty. There were three hidden doors and two vertical shafts. The coffin had to be lifted up one of these, and lowered down the other.

  It took fifteen days for the coffin to be inched through this maze, and installed at last in its final resting-place. The roof and walls of this tomb were painted with all the skill and genius with which the gods have gifted me. There was not a space the size of my thumbnail that was not blazing with colour and movement.

  Five store-rooms led off from the chamber. Into these were packed that treasure which Pharaoh Mamose had accumulated over his lifetime, and which had come close to beggaring bur very Egypt. I had argued with my mistress that, instead of being buried in the earth, this treasure should be used to pay for the army and the struggle that lay ahead of us in our efforts to expel the Hyksos tyrant and to liberate our people and our land.

  "The treasure belongs to Pharaoh,' she had replied. 'We have built up another treasure of gold and slaves and ivory here in Cush. That will suffice. Let the divine Mamose have what is his?I have given him my oath on it.'

  Thus on the fifteenth day, the golden coffin was placed within the stone sarcophagus that had been hewn out of the native rock. With a system of ropes and levers, the heavy lid was lifted over it and lowered into place.

  The royal family and the priests and the nobles entered the tomb to perform the last rites.

  My mistress and the prince stood at the head of the sarcophagus, and the priests droned on with their incantations and their readings from the Book of the Dead. The sooty smoke from the lamps and the breathing of the throng of people in the confined space soured the air, so it was soon difficult to breathe.

  In the dim yellow light I saw my mistress turn pale and the perspiration bead on her forehead. I worked my way through the tightly packed ranks, and I reached her side just as she swayed and collapsed. I was able to catch her before she struck her head on the granite edge of the sarcophagus.

  We carried her out of the tomb on a litter. In the fresh mountain air she recovered swiftly, but still I confined her to her bed in her tent for the rest of that day.

  That night as I prepared her tonic of herbs, she lay quietly and thoughtfully, and after she had drunk the infusion she whispered to me, 'I had the most extraordinary sensation. As I stood in Pharaoh's tomb, I felt suddenly that Tanus was very close to me. I felt his hand touch my face and his voice murmur in my ear. That was when I fainted away.'

  'He will always be close to you,' I told her.

  'I believe that,' she said simply.

  I can see now, though I could not see it then, that her decline began on the day that we laid Tanus in his grave. She had lost the joy of living and the will to go on.

  I WENT BACK INTO THE ROYAL TOMB THE next day with the masons and the corps of slave labourers to seal the doorways and the shafts, and to arm the devices that would guard the burial chamber.

  As we retreated through the maze of passageways, we blocked the secret doorways with cunningly laid stone and plaster, and painted murals over them. We sealed the mouths of the vertical shafts so that they appeared to be smooth floor and roof.

  I set rockfalls that would be triggered by a footstep on a loose paving slab, and I packed the vertical shafts with balks of timber. As these decayed over the centuries and the fungus devoured them, they would emit noxious vapours that would suffocate any intruder who succeeded in finding his way through the secret doorways.

  But before we did all this, I went to the actual burial chamber to take leave of Tanus. I carried with me a long bundle wrapped in a linen sheet. When I stood for the last time beside the royal sarcophagus, I sent all the workmen away. I would be the very last to leave the tomb, and after me the entrance would be sealed.

  When I was alone I opened the bundle I carried. From it I took the long bow, Lanata. Tanus had named it after my mistress and I had made it for him. It was a last gift from the two of us. I placed it upon the sealed stone lid of his coffin.

  There was one other item in my bundle. It was the wooden ushabti figure that I had carved. I placed it at the foot of the sarcophagus. While I carved it, I had set up three copper mirrors so that I could study my own features from every angle and reproduce them faithfully. The doll was a miniature Taita.

  Upon the base I had inscribed the words: 'My name is Taita. I am a physician and a poet. I am an architect and a philosopher. I am your friend. I will answer for you.'

  As I left the tomb, I paused at the entrance and looked back for the last time.

  'Farewell, old friend,' I said. 'I am richer for having known you. Wait for us on the other side.'

  IT TOOK ME MANY MONTHS TO COMPLETE the work on the royal tomb. As we retreated through the labyrinth, I personally inspected every sealed doorway and every secret device that we left behind us.

  I was alone, for my mistress and the prince had gone up into the mountains to the fortress of Prester Beni-Jon. They had gone with all the court to prepare for the wedding of Memnon and Masara. Hui had accompanied them to select the horses from the Ethiopian herds that were part of our payment for the storming of Adbar Seged, and the recovery of Masara.

  When at last my work in the tomb was completed and my workmen had sealed the outer entrance in the cliff-face, I also set off into the mountains, over those cold and windy passes. I was anxious not to miss the wedding feast, but I had left it late. The completion of the tomb had taken longer than I had planned. I travelled as hard as the horses could stand.

  I reached Prester Beni-Jon's palace five days before the wedding, and I went directly to that part of the fortress where my mistress and her suite were lodged.

  'I have not smiled since last I saw you, Taita,' she greeted me. 'Sing for me. Tell me your stories. Make me laugh.'

  It was not an easy task she set me, for the melancholy had entered deeply into her soul, and the truth was that I was not myself cheerful or light-hearted. I sensed that more than sorrow alone was affecting her. Soon we abandoned our attempts at merriment, and fell to discussing affairs of state.

  It might have been a love match, and a meeting of twin souls blessed by the gods as far as the two lovers were concerned, but for the rest of us, the joining of Memnon and Masara was a royal wedding and a contract between nations. There were agreements and treaties to negotiate, dowries to be decided, trade agreements to draw up between the King of Kings and ruler of Aksum, and the regent of Egypt and the wearer of the double crown of the two kingdoms.

  As I had predicted, my mistress had been at first less than enchanted by the prospect of her only son marrying a woman of a different race.

  'In all things they are different, Taita. The gods they worship, the language they speak, the colour of their skins? oh! I wish he had chosen a girl of our own people.'

  'He will,' I reassured her. 'He will marry fifty, perhaps a hundred Egyptians. He will also marry Libyans and Hurri-ans and Hyksos. All the races and nations he conquers in the years to come will provide him with wives, Cushites and Hittites and Assyrians?'

  'Stop your teasing, Taita.' She stamped her foot with something of her old fire. 'You know full well what I mean. Those others will all be marriages of state. This, his first, is a marriage of two hearts.'

  What she said was true. The promise of love that Mem-non and Masara had exchanged in those fleeting moments beside the river was now blossoming.

  I was especially privileged to be close to them in these heady days. They both acknowledged and were grateful for my part in bringing them together. I was for both of them a friend of long standing, somebody that they trusted without question.

  I did not share my mistress's misgivings. Though they were different in every way that she had listed, their hearts were turned from the same mould. They both possessed a sense of dedication, a fierceness of the spirit, a touch of the ruthlessness and the cruelty that a ruler must have. They were a matched pair, he the tiercel and she the falcon. I knew that she would not distract him from his destiny, but rather that she would encourage and incite him to greater endeavour. I was content with my efforts as a matchmaker.

  One bright mountain day, watched by twenty thousand men and women of Ethiopia and of Egypt who crowded the slopes of the hills around them, Memnon and Masara stood together on the river-bank and broke the jar of water that the high priest of Osiris had scooped from the infant Nile.

  The bride and the groom led our caravan down from the mountains, -laden with the dowry of a princess and the treaties and the protocols of kinship sealed between our two nations.

  Hui and his grooms drove a herd of five thousand horses behind us. Some of these were in payment for our mercenary services, and the rest made up Masara's dowry. However, before we reached the junction of the two rivers at Qebui, we saw the dark stain on the plains ahead as though a cloud had cast its shadow over the savannah?but the sun shone out of a cloudless sky.

  The gnu herds had returned on their annual migration.

  Within weeks of this contact with the gnu, the Yellow Strangler disease fell upon our herd of Ethiopian horses, and it swept through them like a flash-flood in one of the valleys of the high mountains.

  Naturally, Hui and I had been expecting the plague to strike when the gnu returned, and we had made our preparations. We had trained every groom and charioteer to perform the tracheotomy, and to treat the wound with hot pitch to prevent mortification until the animal had a chance to recover from the Strangler.

  For many weeks none of us enjoyed much sleep, but in the end, fewer than two thousand of our new horses died of the disease, and before the next flooding of the Nile, those that survived were strong enough to begin training in the chariot traces.

  WHEN THE FLOODS CAME, THE PRIESTS sacrificed on the banks of the river, each to his own god, and they consulted the auguries for the year ahead. Some consulted the entrails of the sacrificial sheep, others watched the flight of the wild birds, still others stared into vessels filled with water from the Nile. They divined in their separate ways.

  Queen Lostris sacrificed to Hapi. Although I attended the service with her and joined in the liturgy and the responses of the congregation, my heart was elsewhere. I am a Horus man, and so are Lord Kratas and Prince Memnon. We made a sacrifice of gold and ivory to our god and prayed for guidance.

  It is not usual for the gods to agree with each other, any more than it is for men to do so. However, this year was different from any other that I had known. With the exception of the gods Anubis and Thoth and the goddess Nut, the heavenly host spoke with one voice. Those three, Anubis and Thoth and Nut, are all lesser deities. Their counsel could be safely discounted. All the great gods, Ammon-Ra and Osiris and Horus and Hapi and Isis and two hundred others, both great and small, gave the same counsel: 'The time has come for the return to the holy black earth of Kemit.'

  Lord Kratas, who is a pagan at heart and a cynic by nature, suggested that the entire priesthood had conspired to place these words in the mouths of their patron gods. Although I expressed shocked indignation at this blasphemy, I was secretly inclined to agree with Kratas' opinion.

  The priests are soft and luxurious men, and for almost two decades we had lived the hard lives of wanderers and warriors in the wild land of Cush. I think they hungered for fair Thebes even more than did my mistress. Perhaps it was not gods, but men who had given this advice to return northwards.

  Queen Lostris summoned the high council of state, and when she made the proclamation that endorsed the dictates of the gods, the nobles and the priests stood and cheered her to a man. I cheered as loud and as long as any of them, and that night my dreams were filled with visions of Thebes, and images of those far-off days when Tanus and Lostris and I had been young and happy.

  SINCE THE DEATH OF TANUS, THERE HAD been no supreme commander of our armies, and the war council met in secret conclave. Of course, I was excluded from this assembly, but my mistress repeated to me every word that was spoken.

  After long argument and debate, the command was offered to Kratas. He stood before them, grizzled and scarred like an old liori, and he laughed that great laugh of his and he said, 'I am a soldier. I follow. I do not lead. Give me the command of the Shilluk, and I will follow one man to the borders of death and beyond.' He drew his sword then and pointed with it at the prince. 'That is the man I will follow. Hail, Memnon! May he live for ever.'

  'May he live for ever!' they shouted, and my mistress smiled. She and I had arranged exactly this outcome.

  At the age of twenty-two years Prince Memnon was elevated to the rank of Great Lion of Egypt and commander of all her armies. Immediately he began to plan the Return.

  Though my rank was only that of Master of the Royal Horse, I was on Prince Memnon's staff. Often he appealed to me to solve the logistical problems that we encountered. During the day I drove his chariot with the blue pennant fluttering over our heads as he reviewed the regiments, and led them in exercises of war.

  Many nights the three of us, the prince and Kratas and I, sat up late over a jar of wine as we discussed the Return. On those nights Princess Masara waited upon us, filling the cups with her own graceful brown hand. Then she sat on a sheep-skin cushion at Memnon's feet and listened to every word. When our eyes met, she smiled at me.

  Our main concern was to avoid the hazardous and onerous transit of all the cataracts on the way down-river. These could only be navigated in flood season, and would thus limit the periods in which we could travel.

  I proposed that we build another fleet of barges below the fifth cataract; with these we could transport our army down to the departure-point for the desert crossing of the great bight. When we regained the river above the first cataract, we would rebuild another squadron of fast fighting galleys and barges to carry us down to Elephantine.

  I was sure that if we timed it correctly, and if we could shoot the rapids and surprise the Hyksos fleet anchored in the roads of Elephantine, we would be able to deal the enemy a painful blow and capture the galleys we needed to augment our force of fighting ships. Once we had secured a foothold, we would then be able to bring down our infantry and our chariots through the gorge of the first cataract, and engage the Hyksos on the flood-plains of Egypt,

  We began the first stage of the Return the following flood season. At Qebui, which had been our capital seat for so many years, we left only a garrison force. Qebui would become merely a trading outpost of the empire. The riches of Cush and Ethiopia would flow northwards to Thebes through this entrepot.

  When the main fleet sailed back into the north, Hui and I, with five hundred grooms and a squadron of chariots, remained behind to await the return of the gnu migration. They came as suddenly as they always did, a vast black stain spreading over the golden savannah grasslands. We went out to meet them in the chariots.

  It was a simple matter to capture these ungainly brutes. We ran them down with the chariots, and dropped a noose of rope over their ugly heads as we ran alongside them. The gnu lacked the speed and the spirit of our horses. They fought the ropes only briefly and then resigned themselves to capture. Within ten days, we had penned over six thousand of them in the stockades on the bank of the Nile which we had built for this purpose.

  It was here in the stockades that their lack of stamina and strength was most apparent. Without cause or reason, they died in their hundreds. We treated them kindly and gently. We fed them and watered them as we would our horses. It was as though their wild wandering spirits would not be fettered, and they pined away.

  In the end we lost over half of those that we had captured, and many more died on the long voyage to the north.

  TWO FULL YEARS AFTER QUEEN LOSTRIS had commanded the Return, our people assembled on the east bank of the Nile above the fourth cataract. Before us lay the desert road across the great bight of the river.

  For the whole of the previous year the caravans of wagons had set out from here. Each of them had been laden with clay jars filled to the brim with Nile water, and sealed with wooden plugs and hot pitch. Every ten miles along the dusty road we had set up watering stations. At each of these, thirty thousand water jars had been buried to prevent them cracking and bursting in the rays of that furious sun.

  We were nearly fifty thousand souls and as many animals, including my dwindling herd of captured gnu. The water-carts set out from the river each evening. Their task was unending.

  We waited on the river-bank for the rise of the new moon to light our way across the wilderness. Although we had planned our departure for this the coolest season of the year, still the heat and the sun would be deadly to both man and beast. We would travel only at night.

  Two days before we were due to begin the crossing, my mistress said, 'Taita, when did you and I last spend a day together fishing on the river? Make ready your fish-spears and a skiff.'

  I knew that she had something of deep import that she wished to discuss with me. We drifted down on those green waters until I could moor the skiff to a willow tree on the far bank, where we were out of earshot of the inquisitive.

  First we spoke of the imminent departure along the desert road, and the prospects of the return to Thebes.

  'When will I see her shining walls again, Taita?' my mistress sighed, and I could only tell her that I did not know.

  'If the gods are kind, we might be in Elephantine by this time next season when the Nile flood carries our ships down the first cataract. After that, our fortunes will ebb and flow like the river, with the hazards and fortunes of war.'

  However, this was not what she had brought me out on to the river to discuss, and now her eyes swam with tears as she asked, 'How long has Tanus been gone from us, Taita?'

  My voice choked as I answered, 'He set out on his journey to the fields of paradise over three years ago, mistress.'

  'So it is longer than that by many months that I last lay in his arms,' she mused, and I nodded. I was uncertain in which direction her questions were leading us.

  'I have dreamed of him almost every night since then, Taita. Is it possible that he might have returned to leave his seed in my womb while I still slept?'

  'All things in heaven are possible,' I replied carefully. 'We told the people that was how Tehuti and Bekatha were conceived. However, in all truth and seriousness, I have never heard of it happening before.'

  We were both silent for a while, and she trailed her hand in the water and then lifted it to watch the drops fall from her fingertips. Then she spoke again without looking at me. 'I think I am to have another child,' she whispered. 'My red moon has waned and withered away.'

  'Mistress,' I answered her quietly, and with tact, 'you are approaching that time of your life when the rivers of your womb will begin to dry up.' Our Egyptian women are like desert flowers that bloom early but fade as swiftly.

  She shook her head. 'No, Taita. It is not that. I feel the infant growing within me.'

  I stared at her silently. Once again I felt the wings of tragedy brush lightly past me, stirring the air and raising the hair upon my forearms.

  'You do not have to ask me if I have known another man.' This time she looked directly into my eyes as she spoke. 'You know that I have not.'

  'This I know full well. Yet I cannot believe that you have been impregnated by a ghost, no matter how beloved and welcome that ghost might be. Perhaps your desire for another child has fathered your imagination.'

  'Feel my womb, Taita,' she commanded. 'This is a living thing within me. Each day it grows.'

  'I will do so tonight, in the privacy of your cabin. Not here upon the river where prying eyes might discover us.'

  MY MISTRESS LAY NAKED UPON THE linen sheets, and I studied first her face and then her body. When I looked upon her with the eyes of a man, she was still lovely to me, but as a physician I could see clearly how the years and the hardships of this life in the wilderness had wrought their cruel change. Her hair was more silver than sable now, and bereavement and the cares of the regency had chiselled their grim message on her brow. She was growing old.

  Her body was the vessel which had given life to three other lives.'But her breasts were empty now, there was none of the milk of a new pregnancy swelling them. She was thin. I should have noticed that before. It was an unnatural thinness, almost an emaciation. Yet her belly protruded like a pale ivory ball out of proportion to those slim arms and legs.

  I laid my hands lightly upon her belly, upon the silvery streaks where the skin had once stretched to accommodate a joyful burden. I felt the thing within her and I knew at once that this was not life beneath my fingers. This was death.

  I could not find words. I turned away from her and went out on to the deck and I looked up at the night stars. They were cold and very far away. Like the gods, they did not care. There was no profit in appealing to them, gods or stars.

  I knew this thing that was growing within my mistress. I had felt it in the bodies of other women. When they died, I had opened the dead womb and seen the thing that had killed them. It was horrible and deformed, bearing no resemblance to anything human or even animal. It was a shapeless ball of red and angry flesh. It was a thing of Seth.

  It was a long time before I could gather the courage to return to the cabin.

  My mistress had covered herself with a robe. She sat in the centre of the bed and looked at me with those huge, dark green eyes that had never aged. She looked like the little girl I once had known.

  'Mistress, why did you not tell me about the pain?' I asked gently.

  'How do you know about the pain?' she whispered back. 'I tried to hide it from you.'

  OUR CARAVAN SET OUT INTO THE DESERT, traveling by moonlight across the silver sands. Sometimes my mistress walked at my side, and the two princesses frolicked along with us, laughing and excited by the adventure. At other times, when the pain was bad, my mistress rode in the wagon that I had equipped for her comfort. Then I sat beside her and held her hand until the powder of the sleeping-flower worked its magic and gave her surcease.

  Every night we travelled just as far as the next watering-station along the road that was now well beaten by the thousands of vehicles that had preceded us. During the long days we lay beneath the awning of the wagon and drowsed in the sweltering heat.

  We had been thirty days and nights upon the road when in the dawn we saw a remarkable sight. A disembodied sail upon the desert, moving gently southwards over the sands. It was not until we had journeyed on for many more miles that we saw how we had been deceived. The hull of the galley had been hidden from us by the bank of the Nile, and below the dunes the river ran on eternally. We had crossed the loop.

  Prince Memnon and all his staff were there to greet us. Already the squadron of new galleys had almost completed fitting out. It was the sail of one of these that we had first descried as we approached the river again. Every plank and mast had been cut and sawn on the great plains of Cush, and transported across the loop of the river. All the chariots were assembled. Hui had herded all the horses across the desert, and the wagons had carried their fodder with them. Even my gnu were waiting in their stockades upon the river-bank.

  Although the wagon caravans carrying the women and the children still followed, the main body of our nation had been brought across. It had been an undertaking that almost defied belief, a labour of godlike proportions. Only men like Kratas and Remrem and Memnon could have accomplished it in so short a time.

  Now only the first cataract still stood between us and the sacred earth of our very Egypt.

  We went on northwards again. My mistress sailed in the new barge that had been built for her and the princesses. There was a large and airy cabin for her, and I had equipped it with every luxury that was available to us. The hangings were of embroidered Ethiopian wool, and the furniture was of dark acacia wood inlaid with ivory and the gold of Cush. I decorated the bulkheads with paintings of flowers and birds and other pretty things.

  As always, I slept at the foot of my mistress's bed. Three nights after we sailed, I woke in the night. She was weeping silently. Although she had stifled her sobs with a pillow, the shaking of her shoulders had awakened me. I went to her immediately.

  'The pain has come again?' I asked.

  'I did not mean to wake you, but it is like a sword in my belly.'

  I mixed her a draught of the sleeping-flower, stronger than I had ever given to her before. The pain was beginning to triumph over the flower.

  She drank it and lay quietly for a while. Then she said, 'Can you not cut this thing out of my body, Taita?'

  'No, mistress. I cannot.'

  'Then hold me, Taita. Hold me the way you used to do when I was a little girl.'

  I went into her bed, and I took her in my arms. I cradled her, and she was as thin and light as a child. I rocked her tenderly, and after a while she slept.

  THE FLEET REACHED THE HEAD OF THE first cataract above Elephantine, and we moored against the bank in the quiet flow of the river before the Nile felt the urging of the cascades and plunged into the gorge.

  We waited for the rest of the army to be ferried down to us, all the horses and the chariots and Lord Kratas' pagan Shilluk regiments. We waited also for the Nile to rise and open the cataract for us to pass down into Egypt.

  While we waited, we sent spies down through the gorge. They were dressed as peasants and priests and merchants with goods to trade. I went down with Kratas into the gorge to map and mark the passage. Now, at low water, every hazard was exposed. We painted channel-markers on the rocks above the high-water line, so that even when the flood covered them, we would still know where those obstacles lurked.

  We were many weeks at this labour, and when we returned to where the fleet was moored, the army was assembled there. We sent out scouting parties to find a route for the chariots and the horses through the rock desert down into Egypt. We could not risk such a precious cargo to the wild waters of the cataract.

  Our spies began to return from Elephantine. They came in secretly and singly, usually in the night. They brought us the very first news of our mother-land that we had heard in all the years of exile.