by Wilbur Smith
The prisoners were roused out of their lethargic despair as they looked around them with astonishment. Very few of the shrubs and plants were as yet in full flower; however, the gibbets and gallows that they were expecting to see were gone. Instead three blacksmiths stood ready at their anvils with flint-headed hammers and chisels in hand, and they hacked the chains from the ankles of the prisoners as each of them came forward. Then to their further astonishment each of the condemned men was given a clay pot of frothing beer, a loaf of bread and a large dried sausage to bolster their spirits. One of the persons that distributed this largesse they recognized immediately as Prince Rameses, whom rumour had counted as long dead. The prisoners cheered him ecstatically and once they were freed of their chains and had wolfed down the food that they had been given they crowded around the prince, making deep obeisance and showering him with their loyal sentiments and congratulations on his return from amongst the dead. Of course they knew me as well, if not better, than any claimant to the title of Pharaoh. I also came in for my share of gratitude and praise.
My sergeants marshalled them into good order. However, the stench that emanated from them was eye-watering. They had worn the same vestments since their arrest by Utteric’s special police several months previously. On my orders they were marched away to the fresh water wells below the kitchens, where they were ordered to strip naked and wash themselves and their clothing with lye. This they did with the alacrity and hilarity engendered by almost hysterical relief at the sudden change in their treatment and circumstances.
Once they had been cleansed and clothed Rameses and I recognized twelve of them. These were all the heads of the leading families of Egypt and had been intimates of Pharaoh Tamose before his death. They had all been fabulously wealthy. When we questioned them we discovered that in every case without exception they had been charged with high treason, found guilty and condemned to death. Naturally all their assets had been confiscated to the royal treasury of Pharaoh. Utteric had never been too bashful to help himself.
Apart from the wealthy elite of Egyptian society, there were amongst the prisoners some of the most popular and successful administrative officials and army officers in Egypt. When their identities had been established I made a welcoming speech to them. I assured them that they were just the sort of citizens that Rameses and I were delighted to welcome into our company. I commiserated with them on the treatment they had suffered at the hands of the false Pharaoh, but I assured them that we had suffered at the hands of Utteric to an equal extent. I invited them to join our faction which looked upon Rameses as the only rightful Pharaoh of Egypt. I assured them that their sentences had been set aside, and they were once again full and free citizens of this great country; and furthermore that Rameses and I would be honoured to listen to their opinions on the subject.
It seemed that every single one of them had strong views and they all wanted to express them simultaneously; the resulting uproar would very soon have got completely out of hand, had not Princess Serrena chosen that moment to enter the conference hall. In all truth, it was I who had arranged for her presence at this critical moment.
The clamour and the shouting sank swiftly into a stunned silence as these scions of the nobility looked upon her for the first time. We should remember that these were men who had not laid eyes upon any member of the opposite sex for almost the entire year that they had been incarcerated by Utteric.
Now they were experiencing an almost religious revelation of beauty, the moment when mere flesh becomes divine in the eyes of the beholder. And that her divine blood had made her lustrous tresses grow back even more shining than before was something quite amazing to behold.
Rameses took her hand and led her forward to present her to them. ‘This is the woman who has promised to become my wife. She is the Princess Serrena of Spartan Lacedaemon,’ he told them and a sound swept through their ranks. It was partly a sigh of yearning and the other part a paean of adulation.
I am never one to miss an opportunity. I raised both of my hands in a silent but unmistakable invitation to them to give their assent, and I was almost swept away by the thunder of their united voices.
‘All hail to Rameses and Serrena! Pharaoh and Queen of our very Egypt!’
It seemed that the obtuse and uneducated Utteric had by some strange chance selected the thirty-two persons for execution with extreme prejudice who almost perfectly made up a superior government cabinet ideally suited to assist and advise Pharaoh Rameses on the administration of greater Egypt.
Included in their ranks were experts and innovators in the fields of agriculture, food, animal welfare, education, fisheries and forestry, mining of metals, building, wealth and taxation, water supplies and – most valuable of all – the army and the navy and the art of waging war. They took to the roles they were offered by Pharaoh with gusto and mostly good sense. My life was not made easier and more relaxed by the fact that these acknowledged experts appealed to me for my advice at every turn of the road, especially if that turn led them to a dead end.
Every now and then new prisoners arrived at the gates of the Garden of Joy, consigned to us by Utteric the Invincible for summary execution. Very soon we had several hundred recruits from this source. From amongst their ranks Weneg and I selected carpenters and boat-builders. We set them to work on the manufacture of four fast sloops and a pair of cutters from designs drawn up by me. These vessels were to be used to communicate with King Hurotas and our allies in Lacedaemon. As we were making the first of these boats ready to put to sea Serrena sought me out in great excitement with the tidings that the three pigeon eggs that had been produced by the female, with a little assistance from the bird she had named Uncle Hui, had now hatched. In a few weeks the chicks would have matured and learned to fly so strongly that they could be dispatched to Serrena’s parents in Lacedaemon to commence their life’s work of ferrying messages back and forth between our two camps.
Serrena herself was busy every night until long after most of the rest of us were asleep. She was compiling what she referred to as her Codis Brevus, a form of writing that was twelve times shorter than the traditional hieroglyphics and totally secure. It comprised a single symbol for the two hundred basic words of our Egyptian language, sufficient to formulate most messages. For other rarer words there was a code to replicate the sound. When she explained the basic principles of the code to me I was immediately intrigued by the simple beauty of the system, and appalled by the fact that I had not thought to develop it for myself. With me to assist her we had a first draft to send to her parents in Lacedaemon with the initial shipment of pigeons. Two superior minds working in unison are often more effective than fifty working individually.
We launched the first of our sloops, which we named Artemis’ Promise, a little after midnight, when the full moon had slipped below the horizon and only the stars gave light for navigation of the river. The crew comprised half a dozen of the most skilled sailors we could find, who had made the voyage from Egypt to Lacedaemon on numerous occasions. The captain of this little craft was an experienced seaman by the name of Pentu. I trusted him both as a man and a seaman. They carried thirty-six pigeons in cages on board. This was the total number of birds that we had been able to hatch in the Garden of Joy and bring to maturity. They were strong enough to make the long flight over open water and savvy enough to have a chance of avoiding the attentions of the fish eagles and other raptors that patrolled the skies above them.
In addition to these birds they carried almost a hundred papyrus scrolls filled with the artistic hieroglyphs of Princess Serrena’s brush and addressed to King Hurotas and Queen Tehuti.
Late the following evening there was a light tap on the door of my chambers and when I opened it a cautious crack I discovered the royal couple huddled on the threshold, bundled up against the chill.
‘Are we disturbing you, Magus? May we come in?’ Rameses only used that form of address when he wanted something excessive from me. Warily I opened t
he door a little wider.
‘Sweet Hathor, of course not and of course you may! Or vice versa.’ I made my reply sufficiently ambiguous not to commit myself, but stood aside to let them in.
They sat side by side in embarrassed silence for a while and then Rameses roused himself and showed his metal. ‘We thought you might like to pray with us.’
‘What an odd thought!’ I looked astonished. ‘The gods make their own decisions without consulting us. In fact, very often they prefer to do exactly the opposite to what we request, just to demonstrate their own superiority.’
Rameses sighed and glanced at Serrena with an ‘I told you so’ expression. Her lovely eyes grew enormous and then to my consternation began to fill with tears. I know what a consummate actress she is, but I sighed with resignation.
‘Very well then,’ I capitulated. Rameses’ dour expression changed to a grin and at the same time Serrena’s tears dried up miraculously. ‘What is to be the substance of our prayers? What is our request to the gods? As if I didn’t know.’
‘We want the most benevolent deities to keep a safe watch over Artemis’ Promise and bring her safely to her moorings in Port Githion,’ Serrena told me earnestly. ‘Then we want them to look after our pigeons and to guide them all safely back to us, with the messages from my mother and father intact.’
‘As simple as that?’ I asked. ‘Very well. Shall we form a circle and hold hands?’ Serrena has lovely soft hands, and I enjoy holding them.
Each of us worked out an estimate or rather a hopeful guess at the time it would take for Artemis’ Promise to make the voyage down the Nile to the sea and then across half the great Middle Sea to Port Githion; then for Hurotas and Tehuti to read and reply to our letters in Serrena’s new Codis Brevus, and finally to launch the pigeons and for them to make the hazardous return flight back to the Garden of Joy. Serrena’s estimate was fifteen days, Rameses was a more realistic twenty and mine was twenty-three days, but only if the gods were in a compliant mood.
The days passed with all the speed of crippled tortoises; first Serrena’s estimate was exceeded and then Rameses’ twenty days with clear skies overhead. Even I was becoming a little despondent and my nightmares were filled with clouds of bedraggled feathers from slaughtered birds. But on precisely the twenty-third morning after the sloops’ departure the gods finally relented and the sky above the castle seemed to turn blue and purple with returning pigeons. We counted them aloud as one after another they fluttered into their welcoming coops.
We anticipated that Hurotas and Tehuti would have released them sparingly; perhaps two or three whenever there was something important to report. But our astonishment mounted in step with our actual bird count, until we reached the number of thirty-six and we stared at each other speechlessly.
There were two elements that amazed us. Firstly Hurotas and Tehuti had despatched all thirty-six birds back to us in one mighty wave; and secondly every single one of them had survived the hazards of their flight.
‘Only my darling mother could have ignored my request and written so fulsomely.’ Serrena spoke in awed tones. Naturally, I felt duty-bound to rise to the defence of the woman I love.
‘Come now, Serrena. Don’t you think you are being a little unfair to the splendid woman who gave you birth?’
‘Compare my mother’s pages against the number sent by my father!’ she challenged me. So I did.
Thirty-two pages were painted in Tehuti’s beautiful multi-coloured hieroglyphics. She had airily ignored her daughter’s suggestions as to brevity. A great deal of her response was in rhyming poetry, and I was forced to concede that much of it was really rather clever. It celebrated the fact that her daughter Serrena had survived the harrowing kidnapping by Panmasi and her subsequent imprisonment and humiliation by Utteric. She extolled Serrena’s courage and fortitude and eagerly anticipated their reunion. She asked if naughty old Taita had remembered to give Serrena the blue sword which she had sent; and charged her to keep the blade sharp, with suggestions on how to do so. She reassured Serrena that the dress for her wedding to Rameses had finally been completed and was truly splendid. She longed to see her wearing it. Then she gave her a number of recipes for songbirds baked in honey and glazed eels which she wanted Serrena’s permission to serve to the wedding guests. Finally she ended by bemoaning the lack of space on the itty-bitty papyrus sheets for further news, and repeating her love and heartfelt wishes for her daughter’s continued safety and flourishing good health. Finally she demanded that Serrena should send her many more pigeons, because there was so much more vital news that she simply had to relate, including the fact that Huisson’s wife had given birth to a baby boy.
In contrast the four pages despatched by Hurotas were masterpieces of brevity and clarity, the work of a great and experienced soldier. They were written in the Codis Brevus developed by Serrena, and further improved upon by myself.
On these four pages that Tehuti allowed to Hurotas he was able to lay out for me his order of battle against Utteric. This would be in two phases: seaborne and land-based. As was customary Admiral Hui would command the fleet and Hurotas himself would command the chariots and the foot-soldiers.
At the beginning of the campaign the chariots would originally be based at the port of Sazzatu. This was situated thirty-five leagues to the east of the point where the Nile empties into the great Middle Sea. It was the ideal place from which to launch the land invasion of Mother Egypt. Already Hurotas had ferried 260 war chariots and their crews to Sazzatu and left them there, to seize the town and surrounding area. The fleet had returned to Lacedaemon to take on board another shipment of men and chariots. The eventual number of chariots assembled at Sazzatu would be in the order of nine hundred. This would make it the largest and most formidable cavalry unit in history.
Once the cavalry had a foothold on the African mainland, the navy would be free to launch its attack up the River Nile. Hui would drive initially for the city of Memphis. There he and Hurotas would link up. Once they had consolidated their hold on that city they could commence the long approach march on Luxor.
Hurotas ended with the single word of greeting and farewell between brothers in arms. This was the cryptic symbol ‘SWORDS’. The meaning was understood between us as: Your companion in arms to the end.
‘Four pages against thirty-two.’ Serrena cocked her head at me. ‘Do you still think I am prejudiced?’
‘I never used that word.’ I dismissed her protest with dignity, and turned to Rameses. ‘Hurotas expresses himself very succinctly.’
‘He makes it sound very easy,’ Rameses protested; so I turned back to Serrena satisfied that I had confused and obscured the object of discussion.
‘What do you think?’ She smiled and spread her hands in a gesture of defeat.
‘When he realizes that he is up against you and my father, I think Utteric’s feet will be slipping in whatever foul-smelling substance he deposits beneath himself as he heads south for the jungles of darkest Africa where he can hide amongst his peers, the apes.’
‘I admire the picturesque manner in which you express yourself, my dear Princess!’ I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed to show my approval, and also because I find her so eminently squeezable.
‘You are always so kind, Taita dear,’ she purred.
Rameses smiled as he watched us. ‘You are a lucky girl, Serrena. You have two fine men who love you.’
‘I know about Taita, but tell me please who the second one you are referring to is?’
Weneg and my other spies in Luxor reported that there was no indication of any sudden military stir in the city of Luxor, but I warned them that it was impending, and would be the sign Utteric had become aware that Hurotas and his sixteen allies had begun their expeditionary onslaught on his dictatorship here in Egypt.
I expected Utteric to respond by hastily assembling all his available forces and hurrying northwards to Memphis and the coast to bolster and reinforce his regiments there and re
sist and attempt to repel King Hurotas’ invasion.
Rameses was eager to begin our offensive immediately, even before Utteric made his move from Luxor downriver to Memphis and the delta. He argued that we had surreptitiously assembled an elite force of almost four hundred highly trained men in the Garden of Joy: men who had suffered grotesquely at the behest of Utteric and his brutes and were eager to take their revenge.
‘What damage do you suggest our little force of four hundred men might inflict on Utteric’s army of over four thousand?’ I asked him.
‘If we attacked after midnight we should be able to set fire to most of the ships that Utteric has moored in the harbour and also burn the warehouses along the river-front where he has stored a great deal of his weapons and other supplies,’ he declared.
‘At the same time we would also disclose our existence. As it stands Utteric believes that Serrena is in solitary confinement behind the Gates of Torment and Sorrow, and that all the prisoners he sends to the same place have been faithfully executed by Doog, and that you and I are somewhere at the far northern end of the world. Do we want to disillusion him just yet?’ I asked and he looked abashed.
‘I thought—’ he began, but I interrupted him.
‘You didn’t think far enough. What we need to do is to get in contact with Hurotas, either by pigeon or by special courier, so we are able to coordinate our strategy. But in the meantime we must restrain our noble instincts until such time as we are able to inflict the greatest desolation and despair upon Utteric the Utter Prick.’
Serrena, who had been listening avidly to our conversation, clapped her hands with delight. ‘Oh Taita, that’s a lovely name for him. Why did you not tell it to me before?’