by Wilbur Smith
Hurotas and Hui had used the newly captured slaves to strengthen the fortifications of the citadel until they were nigh on impregnable, and the interior was not only commodious but also extremely comfortable. Hurotas was determined to make this the capital city of his new nation.
I wasted very little time examining the citadel from afar, and listening to Hui reciting its history. A first-rate admiral he may very well be, but as a raconteur he makes a fine pedant. I shook up my steed and gave him a touch of my spurs, leading the party at a gallop down into the bowl and on towards the citadel. When I was still some distance off I saw the drawbridge being lowered and no sooner than it had touched the near bank but two riders came across it at full pelt, their faint squeals of excitement and high-pitched cries of joy increasing in volume as they approached.
I recognized the leading rider at once. Tehuti led the way as she has always done. Her hair flew out like a flag in the wind behind her. When last I had seen her it was a lovely russet colour, but now it was pure white and glistening in the sunlight like the snowy peaks of the Taygetus Mountains behind her. But even at this distance I could see she was as slim as the young girl I remembered so lovingly.
She was followed at a much more sedate pace by an older and larger lady whom I was certain I had never previously laid eyes on.
Tehuti and I came together still shouting endearments at each other. We both dismounted while our mounts were at almost full gallop and maintained our footing when we hit the ground, but used our residual impetus to come together in a ferocious embrace.
Tehuti was laughing and weeping simultaneously. ‘Where have you been hiding all these years, you naughty man? I thought I would never see you again!’ Tears of joy streamed down her cheeks and dripped from the tip of her chin.
My face was wet also. Of course the moisture was not my own. I had received it second-hand from the woman I was hugging. There was so much I wanted to say to her but the words jammed in my throat. I could only clasp her to my bosom and pray for us never to be parted again.
Then her companion trotted up to where we were involved. She dismounted carefully, and then she came to where we stood with both her arms extended.
‘Taita! I have missed you so bitterly. I thank Hathor and all the other gods and goddesses that they have allowed you to return to us,’ she said in that lovely musical voice which had come down unaltered through all the years, and which I remembered with sudden guilty delight.
‘Bekatha!’ I cried instead, and rushed to seize her in my embrace. But I kept Tehuti firmly in the circle of my other arm as I hugged her little sister, who no longer merited that diminutive adjective.
The three of us clung together sobbing and gabbling joyous nonsense at each other, thereby trying to expunge the memory of all the years that we had been separated.
Suddenly Tehuti, who had always been the more observant of the two, said, ‘It really is uncanny, Tata my lovely old darling, but you have not changed an iota since I waved goodbye to you all those years ago. If anything you seem to have grown younger and more beautiful.’
Of course I made dissenting noises, but Tehuti has always had the knack of choosing the most appropriate description of any subject.
‘Both of you are far more lovely than ever I remember you,’ I countered. ‘You must know that I have recently heard much about you from your doting husbands, but that was only sufficient to whet my appetite rather than assuage it. I have met all four of your sons, Bekatha, when they came to Egypt to help free the homeland from the Hyksos domination. But it was only a brief meeting and now I want to learn everything about them from you.’ For any mother her whelps are the most fascinating objects in creation and so Bekatha regaled us all the way back to the citadel with a minute account of the virtues of her four sons.
‘They are not quite as perfect as my sister paints them.’ Tehuti gave me a surreptitious wink. ‘But then no man alive is.’
‘That’s pure jealousy,’ Bekatha interjected complacently. ‘You see, my poor sister has only one child, and that is a girl.’ Tehuti took the jibe with equanimity. Obviously it had grown stale with over-usage.
Despite her silver mane of hair, or probably because of it, Tehuti was still a magnificent-looking woman. Her countenance was unlined by time or the elements. Her limbs were lean but elegantly sculpted from hard muscle. Her raiment was not festooned with ribbons and flowers and feminine frippery; instead she wore a military officer’s dress tunic. She moved with feminine grace and elegance, but also with masculine power and purpose. She laughed easily but not loudly or without ample reason. Her teeth were white and even. Her gaze was deep and searching. She smelled like a fruiting apple tree. And I loved her.
When I turned back to Bekatha I saw she was the diametric opposite to her elder sister. If Tehuti was Athena the goddess of war, then Bekatha was the earth goddess Gaia personified. She was plump and rosy. Even her face was rounded like the full moon, but more highly coloured, pink and glossy. She laughed often and loudly, for no good reason other than the joy of life itself. I remembered her as a pretty little slip of a girl just coming into puberty, half the size of Hui her husband. But now that she had grown large with repeated childbirth he still adored her, and I soon discovered that I did also.
The three of us rode well ahead of the rest of the party. Hui and Rameses hung back tactfully to let the two sisters and me resume our very singular relationship. There was so much for us to recall and delight in that the time was not enough, before we found ourselves before the main gates of the citadel of Sparta, the Loveliest One.
Although an army of slaves had been labouring upon it for many decades it was not yet completed, but I judged that its mighty walls and systems of moats and fortifications would be able to repel the greatest and most determined army of any potential enemy of which I was aware. I reined in my horse in order to admire it in detail, and while I was doing so Hui and Rameses rode up to join us.
Both Tehuti and Bekatha immediately transferred their attention from me to Rameses. I did not resent this. They had given me more than my full share, and Rameses was truly a striking-looking man. In all fairness I knew of no other to match him; well, perhaps that is not strictly correct but modesty precludes me from further comparisons. So I retired gracefully into the background.
‘And who might you be, young sir?’ Bekatha was never one to hang back. She studied Rameses boldly.
‘I am not anybody of particular account, Your Royal Highness.’ Rameses dismissed her query with a modest smile. ‘I am merely the captain of the ship which brought Lord Taita to visit you on your lovely island. I am named Captain Rammy.’ He and I had agreed not to prattle about his close links to the throne of Egypt. We were both fully aware that Pharaoh Utteric Turo the Great had his spies in high and unlikely places.
Tehuti was studying Rameses with an intensity which was much more telling than her little sister’s eager prattle.
‘You are a member of the Egyptian royalty.’ When she spoke Tehuti made it sound like an accusation and a challenge.
‘How did you know that, Your Majesty?’ Rameses was nonplussed.
‘When you speak your accent is unmistakable.’ Tehuti went on studying his face a few moments longer, and then she said with certainty, ‘You remind me of somebody I knew well but whom I have not seen in many a long year. Let me think!’ Then her expression changed again, becoming more eager and fascinated. ‘You remind me of my brother Pharaoh Tamose—’ She broke off and stared at her reluctant relative. ‘Rammy! Yes of course! You are my nephew Rameses.’ She turned away from him and focused her disapproval on me, but her censure was alleviated by the sparkle of happiness in her eyes and the barely suppressed laughter on her lips. ‘You naughty, naughty man, Tata! Whatever gave you the notion of trying to dupe me? As if I would not have known my own flesh and blood. I taught this little hellion his first swear words. Don’t you remember, Rameses?’
‘Shit and corruption! And bugger me sideways! I remember them s
o well.’ Rameses merged his laughter with hers. ‘I was only about three or four years old at the time and you were an old lady of sixteen or seventeen, but I will never forget those sweet words of wisdom.’
Tehuti leaped from the back of her mount and spread her arms wide in invitation. ‘Come and give your old auntie a kiss, you horrid child!’
I watched the two of them embrace with pleasure; and this was not solely because I was no longer obliged to leap from the end of the earth into eternity to make good my pledge to Rameses. It took some time for the greeting ceremony to run its course because naturally Bekatha felt obliged to add her considerable weight to the occasion, but finally we were free to mount up again and continue on our way to the citadel. The two sisters rode within touching distance of Rameses, one on each side of him.
The gates were thrown wide open as we approached the citadel and King Hurotas scrambled down the scaffolding which still covered part of the new fortifications and on which he had been directing the builders. In appearance he seemed more like a workman himself than a king, covered as he was by dust and grime. Of course he had recognized me from afar. I am not a person who is easy to overlook, even in a crowd. And then he had been intrigued to see his own wife and her sister clinging adoringly to the young stranger who rode between them.
‘This is my nephew Rameses!’ Tehuti yelled at her husband when they were still separated by fifty paces.
‘He is our brother Tamose’s second eldest son,’ Bekatha endorsed the relationship. She was making absolutely certain there was no misunderstanding as to what was meant by the word ‘nephew’. ‘And he is next in line to the throne of Egypt after you and Taita have ridded the world of Utteric.’ I was taken a little aback at her assumption of our future role as kingmakers. However, Hurotas was obviously inured to her flights of fantasy. He came on readily to embrace Rameses, and transfer to his admiral’s uniform a liberal portion of the builder’s muck that covered his royal personage.
At last he drew back and announced every bit as loudly as Bekatha had done, ‘This calls for a celebration to welcome Prince Rameses. Tell the chefs that I am hosting a banquet this evening, with the best wine and good food for everybody.’
That evening the inner courtyard of the citadel was lit by a dozen large bonfires and trestle tables sufficient to seat several hundred of the most important nobles of Lacedaemon. The king and his immediate family sat in the centre of a raised dais where they were visible to all the lesser creatures in creation. Of course I sat between my two former charges, Tehuti and Bekatha. Directly below us were seated the sons of Bekatha and Hui. These were the four splendid young men that had accompanied their father to Egypt on the campaign to rid the world of King Khamudi. Although I had met them only briefly at that time I am an infallible judge of humanity. I knew that Bekatha had bred true to her line of Pharaohs and that her sons were choice specimens of the Egyptian nobility. Two of her boys were already married and their pretty little wives sat with them. They were all close in age to Rameses, and they were treating him like the honoured guest he so clearly was. I expressed my approval of them to Bekatha, their mother, and she took it as nothing more than their due.
‘In fact I had hoped that one of my boys would marry their cousin, Serrena,’ she confided in me. I was by this time aware that Serrena was the name of Tehuti’s mysterious and elusive daughter, whose empty chair awaited her arrival to sit beside her father King Hurotas at the head of the festive table. Bekatha went on speaking with barely a pause for breath: ‘All four of them pressed their suits to her, one after the other. But she turned them down prettily with the excuse that she could not marry someone with whom she had bathed naked as a child, and had discussed their differing genital structures while sharing the same piss pot. I wonder what excuse she had for the hundred and one other suitors who have come in a constant stream from the ends of the earth to ask for her hand in marriage.’
‘I look forward to meeting her. I gather that she is a very handsome young lady,’ I acknowledged, and Bekatha went on enlarging on the subject.
‘Everybody and their uncles say that she is the most beautiful girl in creation, a fitting rival to the goddess Aphrodite; but I cannot see it myself. Anyway, Serrena is so fussy in her choice of a husband that she will most probably die an old spinster.’ Bekatha shot a teasing glance at her sister on the other side of me. Tehuti had followed our conversation but she did not deign to reply and merely stuck out the tip of her pink tongue in Bekatha’s direction.
‘Where is this paragon of feminine pulchritude?’ I demanded. None of this was news to me, but I thought it best to divert the two of them from their discussion before it boiled over from fun into fury. ‘Will she be joining us this evening?’
‘Do you see an empty stool anywhere in the courtyard?’ Bekatha asked, and looked pointedly in the direction of King Hurotas who was sitting across the table from us. The seat at his left hand was the only one in the packed courtyard that was presently unoccupied. Bekatha grinned and answered her own question before her elder sister could reply, ‘Princess Serrena of Sparta marches to the beat of her own drum which she alone can hear.’
She said it in a jocular tone, almost as though she meant it as a compliment rather than an accusation. But King Hurotas, who had been following the conversation, leaned forward quickly and intervened: ‘When a beautiful woman is only an hour late it is because she is making a particular effort to be on time.’
Bekatha subsided immediately and I realized who truly ruled this kingdom and where his devotions lay. There was an almost immediate lull in the clamour of festivities, and I thought for an instant that the rest of the company was reacting to the king’s rebuke, but then I realized that very few of them could have overheard it, and that they were paying no heed to Hurotas or anyone else in the courtyard. Instead every head was turning towards the main doors opening out into the courtyard from the citadel.
Through them walked a young woman. This is an inaccurate description of her entrance into my life, and that of Rameses. Princess Serrena did not walk; she glided without appearing to move any part of her body, for the long skirts she wore screened her legs and lower parts from her hips downwards. Her hair was piled high on her head, a crown of dense shimmering gold. The lightly sun-tanned skin of her arms and shoulders was as unblemished and glossy as polished marble or freshly woven silk. She was tall, but her body was perfectly proportioned.
She was not pretty, because that adjective suggests a simpering vacuity. She was simply magnificent. Every facet of her face was perfection. When taken together they exceed my powers of description. As she moved her features changed subtly, perfection surpassing perfection. She captivated every person who looked upon her. However, her single most striking feature – if it were possible to distinguish it – was her eyes. These were enormous but in perfect harmony with the rest of her face. They were a particular shade of green that was brighter than any emerald. They were also piercing and perceptive, but at the same time clement and forgiving.
There were only two other women I have known who came even close to her in beauty. One was Queen Lostris; she who had been my first love. Then there was the woman who sat beside me at this moment: Queen Tehuti, who had been and was still my second love. They were the mother and the grandmother of this young woman.
However, Princess Serrena was far and away the loveliest person, living or dead, whom I had ever laid my eyes upon.
She picked out her mother sitting beside me and she turned towards us with her smile blossoming. Then at the far end of the table Rameses came to his feet, and this movement switched Serrena’s attention to him. The smile on Serrena’s face faded to an expression of awe. She froze with one foot raised, the toe of a dainty slipper peeping from under her skirts. The splendid couple stared at each other for a long moment during which nobody else existed in the world for either of them. Eventually Serrena lowered her foot to the ground. But her eyes were still locked to his. Then she blushed softly, a rosy
glow that lit her face and impossibly made it even more beautiful than it already was.
‘Are you not my cousin Rameses? My mother told me you had come to visit us,’ she asked in a gorgeous lilting voice that was only slightly breathless. It carried clearly to every corner of the silent courtyard. There was a light in her eyes that reminded me sharply of the way that Tehuti had looked at Zaras on their first meeting almost thirty years previously. Rameses bowed deeply but speechlessly to her question, never taking his eyes from her ineffably lovely features.
Tehuti was sitting close to me but nobody in the citadel courtyard was watching us as she reached out surreptitiously beneath the table top, and squeezed my fingers. ‘Yes!’ she whispered softly but vehemently, and again, ‘Yes!’
She had recognized from her own experience that enchanted moment when her daughter had, at the advanced age of nineteen years, found her soul mate.
The days and weeks and months that followed were some of the happiest that I can ever remember.
The first delight for me was when King Hurotas and his queen invited me as their guest to visit the newly dug treasure chambers in the depths of the citadel dungeons. We climbed down many successive flights of stone steps with ten heavily armed guards preceding us and another ten following us. Every one of them was holding aloft a burning torch to light our way. When we reached the bottom of the deepest flight Hurotas used a heavy bronze key to unlock the massive door that confronted us. Then three of the guards strained to swing it open.
I followed the king through into the royal treasure chamber and looked around me eagerly. Although not a word had been said about the purpose of this expedition to the depths of the earth, I thought I knew what to expect. Both Hurotas and Tehuti were watching me with eyes that sparkled with anticipation. Almost at once I spotted what I was searching for. There were almost two dozen large cedar-wood chests stacked head-high in a corner of the wall of heavy granite blocks. Although I am usually able to restrain myself from abandoned behaviour, on this occasion I made an exception and I let out a shout of excitement. Then I rushed across the room and tried to lift down one of the chests from the stack. I was unsuccessful. I required three of the guards to assist me before we could set it down on the flooring slabs. Then they levered the lid open with their sword blades, and stepped back.