She would kill him if she had to. That much she now knew. She had calmed herself and just as she and Bayek had discussed, she had taken all that fear and foreboding and was using it to her advantage.
‘Let’s see how you fight,’ he said, still swapping the knife.
She took up her stance. And heard the sound a second before she saw the arrow. It cut the air past her ear and into the ringleader, hurling him backwards. For a moment she thought he’d been hit in the chest, and then realized that the arrow had pierced his robes beneath the armpit and now pinned him to the tree. He was about to wrest himself away when there came another arrow, this time on the other side, also pinning him to the tree by his tunic. Then a third – between his legs.
Aya spun, as did the other thieves, all eyes going to a man on a horse at the edge of the watering hole. He wore a shawl draped over his head, keeping out the sun, but she could see dark eyes with kohl applied. He had the look of a seasoned traveller and his ability with a bow was certainly in no doubt. He’d notched another arrow and his bow was wavering between the pinned ringleader and his three followers.
For a moment or so, nothing was said.
‘You come to save her, have you?’ sneered the leader, pulling feebly at his tunic.
The new arrival laughed drily. ‘Any fool can see it’s you I’m saving.’
For her part, Aya wasn’t sure how she felt. Gratitude, relief. The day she would kill was a little further away. Was there even a tiny measure of disappointment in there somewhere? She had, after all, been prepared to do it. She had been willing to take that step.
‘Now,’ said the new arrival, ‘it’s time for you men to make your choice. Die or leave, it’s up to you.’
56
The men had chosen the second option, scrambling away and leaving with their tails between their legs. As they did so, Aya was able to get a better look at the stranger. He had removed the shawl from his head and she did her best not to wince at the sight of the scars on his face. With the men fading into the heat blur she watched him dismount and perform the same rituals as she had: watering his horse, washing and drinking, seemingly at ease with her studying him.
‘You’re wondering whether to thank me,’ he said at length. ‘You’re wondering whether you need to thank me, whether you thanking me will be an acknowledgement that you are somehow in my debt, and that maybe I will want to call in that debt.’
Well. That was an odd thing to state.
‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘What is your name, stranger?’
‘My name is Bion.’
‘Bion of …?’
This was not a man who betrayed his emotions, she decided. His face was still and placid when he made his reply. Was it serenity, she wondered, or something else? ‘Bion of Faiyum, once upon a time. Now just Bion of the desert.’
‘You’ve been in the army?’
‘Very astute. The Royal Guard, yes, the Machairophoroi.’
‘Which is where you got those scars? Where you learned your bowmanship?’
‘Indeed.’ He cupped his hands and did the same as she had, finding the cool water, drinking and then splashing it on his forearms and face.
Her scarf lay by the side of the watering hole. Seeing him use his hands on his face she handed it to him. Regardless of who this man was, it was the least she could do in return.
He took it, thanking her silently, using it as a facecloth.
‘I was also one of the best bowmen in my company,’ he said.
‘Yet your bow looks new,’ she said when he had finished wiping his face.
He sat back on his haunches. He was smiling, but it was a blank smile, she decided. Weirdly empty, even. He was winding her scarf in his hands, wringing it out, making it taut. ‘You’re observant,’ he said.
Droplets of water fell from the scarf to the brickwork. He wrapped the ends of it around his knuckles. The moment felt odd, and Aya found herself tensing, unsure why.
Then he turned his face towards her.
57
We had moved, of course. Our new camp stood between a fast-flowing section of the river and two hillocks that shielded us from the worst of the weather. It was up on to those hillocks that we went for each morning’s lessons, when I tried so hard not to think of Aya, because the thought of her would divert me from my true purpose, which was to learn and get back to her.
Only the gods knew how much I missed her, and as each day passed I became more and more frustrated that I was no nearer to seeing her. What my father thought of my mood, I couldn’t say. Whatever he thought of what Aya had done he’d kept to himself, had done ever since our morning conversation. But he worked me harder than ever before, tested me unrelentingly.
Until one day it came to a head. I pulled back from an attack, took several steps back, refusing to parry. It was time to go. I was heading back to Siwa. With his approval or without. Upset at my behaviour, my father dropped his sword arm, snapping at me, ‘What is it, Bayek?’ I must have glanced in the direction of Siwa. For before I even spoke, he sighed explosively.
‘You’re not done yet. Your training is not complete. I’m trying to teach you as fast as I can, but –’
‘Not complete, Father?’ I snapped, sheathing my weapon. ‘I’ve been training for years now, every single day, standing on hilltops and in the sun, a new camp, a different base, a new place, and my dedication has never wavered.’
‘It is now. I can see it.’
It would never be enough training, I could see that now. And it had nothing to do with me. My father was afraid. Not for himself, no. He was afraid for me.
‘I need to see Aya and my mother again.’ I kept it as simple as possible, hoping he would break through his worries. Understand.
‘When you are a fully fledged Medjay.’
‘When will that be? Weeks? Months? Years?’
He indicated the cut on my face, still not entirely healed. ‘When you no longer are susceptible to an attack like that.’
I scoffed. ‘How many times have you told me that a Medjay’s apprenticeship never really ends?’ I did not tell him that Aya always believed this, had even approved when I’d told her my father had said that to me. ‘Just because an opponent can inflict a cut that doesn’t mean to say he could deal the fatal blow. I want to do it now, Father. I want to return to Siwa. I want to see Aya, perhaps even catch her up if I’m lucky.’
At that I straightened, shoulders back, looking at him with eyes that I knew blazed with determination and that I hoped hid the more tremulous feelings swirling within. I loved him, but also I felt sad for him.
He rolled his eyes. ‘You’re reckless. You’re impetuous. You’re driven too much by what’s in here, and not enough by what’s up here.’ He tapped at his chest and then at his head.
I set my jaw. ‘That is so, and I can try to curb it. But consider this: wasn’t it my impetuousness, my recklessness, that brought me to you?’
He gave a short laugh ‘But you almost destroyed my plans.’
‘Your plans are to continue the way of the Medjay, to extend the bloodline, isn’t that the case?’
He looked at me, neither confirming nor denying it, and I ploughed on. ‘And didn’t my recklessness achieve that? Aya believes that you tolerate our relationship because you see her as being our best chance of producing a child, a future Medjay to be trained at some future date, am I right? Is that why you never sent her away?’
Again there was no confirmation. No denial. Just those same neutral eyes that I had watched for so long. It struck me then that Aya had left us because what she felt for her aunt was love in its purest and most undiluted form, and though what I felt for my own father was love, too, it wasn’t as unadulterated, as uncomplicated as that. It came in strange, indecipherable patterns and I was far beyond childhood. I respected him, but his approval was no longer my overriding goal in life.
I had lost something important when Aya left. Something that meant more to me than earning my father’s respec
t, I now realized. Pure and simple. The love Aya brought into my life had gone, and that was not something I was willing to give up on.
I knew with complete certitude, then and there, that I was leaving. And if I wasn’t fully trained to be a Medjay, then, well, so what? I was of the bloodline. Nobody could take that away from me. I had years of training. I had a lifetime left to train, and learn more. Maybe – just maybe – I didn’t even need my father in order to follow this path.
And so: ‘I’m going,’ I told him. ‘Call it impetuous or reckless if you like. Tell me I haven’t yet completed my training and I may well believe you. But this,’ I waved a hand at the hills, at camp, at the river and the open land beyond, ‘this is not enough. I’m sorry, Father. I wish you would come with me. But I’m going either way.’
He came towards me and I found myself tensing, no idea what he intended, his eyes unreadable. But what I finally saw in them was a sorrowful understanding. A dawning respect. Somehow it had grown in the space between us, since our last argument, the morning after Aya had left.
‘No, you’re not ready,’ he said, ‘although you’re not as unready as you used to be. But I recognize determination when I see it. We’ll travel back to Siwa together. Perhaps we will indeed catch up with Aya, and even if we don’t, you will see her when we get there. Make your peace with her. I won’t interfere – neither one way nor the other.’
The next thing I knew he was pulling away, and there was a softness about him I’d never seen before. ‘Here,’ he said reaching to a bag that he always brought to the hill, from which he usually took a flask of water, offering me a drop if he thought I’d practised hard enough. Only now it wasn’t water that he offered me but something else: a medallion, the like of which I’d never seen before. And yet at once it felt so familiar. Even the weight of it, when he reached, took my hand, and pressed it into my palm, felt just right.
‘Only given to true Medjay,’ he said. ‘I want you to have it.’
I held it. Astonished. Years of scrabbling for approval, and now that I was beyond that need … ‘This is yours?’ I asked him. ‘You want me to have it?’
‘You have earned it. I should have given you the opportunity to earn it before. I regret my lack of faith in you. I see in you what I once saw in myself.’ He sighed, slowly. ‘I too often still see my little boy, instead of a grown man.’
The admission pained him. I stared at the medallion. It sat in my palm. I did indeed feel as though I’d earned it. And yet I still couldn’t quite bring myself to close my fingers around it.
‘What of Aya?’ I asked him.
‘You don’t need my approval,’ he said.
‘But if I did?’
He sighed. ‘You and she want different things, Bayek, I think you know that. Perhaps at some point you might need to make your choice between Aya and the way of the Medjay. For your sake, I hope not. Perhaps even she will choose to join our fight. Whatever happens, and for the sake of Egypt I hope you both choose wisely. But you don’t have to make that choice here and now, so take the medallion you’ve earned. You are a Medjay now.’
I pushed it into my pouch where it nestled with the feathers I still kept there, and other little tokens of my travels.
But then, looking up and about to speak, I saw him tense, raising his head and sniffing at the same time.
His eyes widened. His mouth dropped open. The air seemed to crackle.
‘He’s here,’ my father said.
58
Two things came at once: the sound of an arrow and my father hurling us both to the ground. We rolled, my father pushing me like a sack of grain down the opposite side of the hill. I saw red blood and realized he’d been hit, a wound in his arm, the arrow already snapped in the fall.
At the bottom of the hill he grunted, reached, grasped the snapped-off shaft, tried to pull it from his shoulder, and then stopped with an agonized growl of pain.
‘He’s barbed it,’ he grimaced, but when he looked at me, what I saw in his eyes was something I’d seen only twice before: the night of Menna’s attack on our house and the night that we’d hunted the killer in Elephantine. It was a look of excitement. This was what he had prepared for. In action, his fears and worries faded away.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it looks like our man has taught himself archery in the meantime. His scent hasn’t changed.’
‘You smelled him?’
He clapped a hand to my shoulder. ‘This is why you’re not quite a fully fledged Medjay, Bayek,’ he grinned, clearly finding steady ground while in danger.
‘Can you move?’ I asked him quickly, conscious that our attacker would be trying to press home his advantage.
‘I can walk, I can run and I can swing a sword.’ He gestured towards our camp, the two shelters resting on supports, not exactly sanctuary. But inside them were our bows.
I hadn’t yet trained myself to detect the scent of an advancing enemy on the wind, but my bowmanship had improved in leaps and bounds during my training. I was a natural, it had turned out – as good as my father, perhaps even better. Together we were more than a match for our attacker.
‘Come on,’ said my father, ‘we need to get there before he makes his way around.’
We took off running, the shelters containing our bows and quivers like a pair of prizes before us. A peaceful scene. Four horses munching away at the grass that grew there, the soil fed and enriched by the water flowed close by where the bank fell away sharply to the river.
Now, if we could just reach our bows.
But no. What we heard as we made our dash between the foot of the hill and our camp was the sound of approaching hooves, and when I twisted my waist to look behind us I caught sight of the killer.
At last. The man who had been hunting us all these years. He sat upright, steady on his horse, holding his bow and arrow with all the balance and confidence of the best Nubian bowmen. I thought to myself that if indeed he had gained his prowess in the intervening years then he had learned it to perfection, and the thought chilled me. The idea that he might have spent all these years searching for us; that my father had been right, and that Aya had been wrong – that chilled me too.
He wore his shawl like a cowl over his head. His eyes were blackened with charcoal, a weathered face was scarred and inset with eyes that were alert and hard, and on seeing them I realized that I was used to eyes like that. I’d looked across the training area at eyes like that every day for so many years.
And then it struck me. I remembered a look I’d seen on my father’s face, and suddenly I knew what it meant. All along my father had sensed that he and the killer were the same. And the reason he could say with such certainty that the killer would never give up was that he himself would never have given up. He would have left the battle, reassessed, taught himself to use a bow in order to surprise his prey, kept looking. He would have finished the job and, sure enough, here was the killer – come to finish the job.
And then I saw something else: around the killer’s wrist was tied a red scarf I recognized.
It belonged to Aya.
I didn’t have time to react. The killer loosed his arrow. ‘Father!’ I screamed and perhaps my warning was enough to save his life because he jinked quickly to the left and so instead of piercing his body, the arrow once again found his shoulder, sending him to the ground.
Gods! Now he had a second arrow in him. And as I scrambled to him I saw that his face was already draining of blood. His tunic was saturated with it, front and back. Right then it struck me that my father might have met his match, and at that thought terror coursed through me like a flooded river, washing away all my youthful arrogance and confidence, revealing only failure on the rocks.
On my knees, I saw the horseman pull his steed round close to the edge of the river, notching another arrow. I snatched my knife, bought in Zawty a lifetime away, stood and threw. My best throw, in the circumstances a great one, and it took the bowman by surprise, thudding into his shawl at his side
, doing enough to unseat him so that he tumbled backwards off his horse, bow and quiver going with him.
Father had pulled himself to his knees and now stood. Offering him my hand I dragged him up with me, drew my sword and started off across the plain towards where the bowman now knelt close to our shelters. He looked up, saw me coming, my father not far behind, and then reached and yanked my knife from his side, throwing off his shawl at the same time and then standing, drawing his sword.
I saw his scars. I saw his teeth bared, his eyes cold and emotionless. Light ran along his sword blade. The river bubbled and churned behind him. The scarf that I knew so well fluttered at his wrist.
‘Brave Medjay,’ he said, a sneer from most people, but this man’s eyes were flecked with emptiness as he spoke, as he brought his sword to bear.
Metal met metal with a sound that rang in my ears. I had dared to believe that the ferocity of my attack might put him on the back foot – even that I might take him by surprise. But no. He met the move with an ease that I might have found impressive had I not been his opponent.
‘Where is she?’ I yelled at him, surging forward again, my blade swinging, trying to remember to keep my emotions in check, knowing that to lose control risked losing the fight. ‘What have you done to her?’
Beside me I registered my father arrive and saw his brow cloud with confusion. He hadn’t made the connection I had; that our pursuer had been watching us for some time and that he had seen Aya leave and followed her.
But what then? Gods, what had he done to her?
‘Where is she?’ I repeated, no longer shouting. Let him think me weakened by concern. A perceived lack of focus would be to my advantage.
‘Bayek, recover yourself,’ warned my father from by my side, a common mantra from our coaching, spoken whenever my temper seemed to be getting the better of me. I didn’t bother to answer. At least I was rewarded by the sight of the killer’s tunic reddening, just as my father’s had. The wound I’d given him would bleed a lot, and maybe if I could prolong the fight for long enough then he would weaken and tire and his superior swordsmanship be not such an advantage. Perhaps I could even dream of prevailing.
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