Pharaoh

by Wilbur Smith

  I went to her, took her hand in mine and led her back to where Rameses waited to receive her. She glimmered and glided by my side and the smile she laid upon her spectators seemed to captivate them all anew. Rameses held out his hand to welcome her. Then I turned back to our guests and addressed them again.

  ‘I take infinite pleasure in presenting to you the daughter of King Hurotas and his wife Queen Tehuti. This is the Princess Royal of Lacedaemon. Serrena is her name. She is betrothed to our Pharaoh Rameses. He has rescued her from captivity in the hands of the false Pharaoh Utteric. She is to become your queen. My lords, please pay her your respects, I beg of you!’

  One after the other they pressed forward and made obeisance to Serrena and she gave each of them such a smile that I am certain turned them immediately into her admirers and followers for their lifetimes. In this way I was instrumental in making certain of Rameses’ ascension to the throne of Egypt, and of my own place as his chancellor and advisor.

  I gave our new recruits very little time to find their places in our ranks. I knew by name and usually by face those of them who were truly valuable to our cause and I wasted no time in introducing them to the others who had preceded them. Then I slotted each of them into the position in which they would be most effective in our plans.

  My first real concern was to learn from them everything that they knew about Utteric and his convoluted machinations, so that we would be in a stronger position to fight and destroy him. Much of that which they were able to tell me I already knew. But I was fascinated to hear from them how Utteric had succeeded in turning himself into an elusive personality only superficially attached to reality. He had conceived a number of identities or aliases, such as the person who had been shot down by an arrow on the podium of the stadium and then returned as the living Utteric a few hours later. According to my new informants those persons fulfilling the role of Pharaoh in public were more often than not impostors. These included those commanding his armies in the field, who were almost exclusively surrogates. This was also a fine ruse for him to avoid the hazards of the battlefield while earning all the plaudits of victory, and avoiding the ignominy of defeat. Of course this made it considerably more difficult for us to bring him down. We could never be absolutely certain we were striking at the real Utteric, or at his surrogate.

  I also learned from these sources that the armies of Hurotas and his allies had at last landed in Egypt. They had swept in from the great Middle Sea in an enormous flotilla of ships to land almost a thousand of their chariots at Sazzatu only thirty leagues to the east of where the Nile debouched into the sea. While these chariots commanded by General Hui drove overland for the city of Abu Naskos, the ships stormed into the multiple mouths of the Nile itself and fought their way southwards to lay siege to the same city, taking it in a forked attack from both land and river.

  Abu Naskos had replaced Memphis as Utteric’s northern capital. Memphis itself had suffered irreparable damage during the earlier siege by Hurotas and myself when we mined the walls to defeat Khamudi, the Hyksos leader. Utteric had built a new city and formidable capital at Abu Naskos forty leagues further north. This was on the site of the ruins of another ancient city, whose origins were lost in the mists of antiquity.

  With all this very much in the forefront of my mind I decided that I must judge for myself if it was the real Utteric who was taking the bulk of his army northwards or if one of his impostors was assuming the role. If it was Utteric at the head of his army then we would be justified in attempting to seize the city of Luxor from the depleted divisions he had left to garrison it, even though we were a mere four hundred strong holed up in the Garden of Joy. We must hope to be able to turn the remaining defendants of the city to our banner. I was determined to go alone and witness for myself Utteric’s departure from Luxor, not taking even Weneg or Rameses to accompany me. I warned the sentries on the main gates not to bruit the news of my leaving abroad and in the hour after midnight, the stillest hour of the night, I slipped through the gates of the Garden of Joy into the darkness and headed down the hills towards the city of Luxor.

  The moon was still high and full and the dawn hours away when I reached my destination and looked down on the Nile from the high ground. The harbour was lit up almost as bright as day by the flares. A constant stream of stevedores were tramping down the dock under heavy burdens to load them into the holds of the ships. As each vessel was filled it battened down its hatches and pushed off from the dock, turned its bows down the current and disappeared into the darkness towards the city of Abu Naskos.

  Then as the sky lightened and the rim of the sun pushed above the eastern horizon a small party of horsemen galloped through the gates of the harbour and reined in their mounts beside one of the moored war galleys. The riders dismounted and in a group climbed the gangway to the ship’s top deck. They were all dressed in the style which had become popular with the upper classes since the ascension of Utteric to the throne. These included wide-brimmed hats that concealed their features. The crew of the galley pushed off from the jetty. And as the ship swung across the current one of the passengers lifted his hat and stooped to kiss his male companion on his open mouth. Then as he turned away and donned the hat once more I caught a brief glimpse of his features. I sighed with satisfaction. They were unmistakably those of Utteric the Invincible. My vigil had been fully rewarded.

  I hurried back to the Garden of Joy and summoned the war council to an urgent session to plan our next move. I wanted to take full advantage of the fact that Utteric had left Luxor and rushed away to the defence of his northern city, which was more obviously menaced by King Hurotas’ onslaught. It was a measured and well-reasoned debate which lasted most of the remainder of the day.

  We finally decided to wait a further five full days in order to give Utteric time to get well on his way into the north before we made an open onslaught on the forces that he had left in Luxor. We had no way of knowing accurately how numerous these were. Of course Utteric was an inexperienced commander, but in extenuation of his mistakes he had no way of knowing what a stronghold we had managed to build out of the Garden of Joy with the superior men that he had sent to us for execution. There was an excellent chance that he had reduced his garrison in Luxor to a perilous degree. In essence what we had to ascertain was whom he had left in command and what force he had placed at the disposal of the person he had appointed.

  In the interim we decided that some of us who were known and well regarded in Luxor, despite the enmity of Utteric and the fact that we were rumoured to have been obliterated by Doog and his tormentors, should nevertheless go into the city and attempt to make contact with those citizens who we knew were well disposed to our cause. We should warn them of our intentions and try to enlist their sympathies for the elevation of Rameses to Pharaoh in the place of Utteric.

  As if all these anxieties and incipient disasters were not sufficient for me to worry over, that very same evening, just as I was opening a jug of red wine to soothe my frayed nerves, I was visited unexpectedly in my quarters in the southern tower by Rameses and Serrena. Their demeanour was unusual, and immediately put me on alert. Firstly they knocked timidly on my door rather than entering unannounced. They were holding hands, but neither of them was able to look me directly in the eyes. Nevertheless they expressed the fervent hope that they were not disturbing me in any way. When I assured them that this was not the case the conversation came to an abrupt hiatus. I broke the silence by offering each of them a mug of my wine, notwithstanding the fact that it was my last jug. They both accepted with gratitude and there was silence once again as we all tasted the wine with fierce concentration.

  I finally broke the silence by enquiring if there was any other way that I might be able to assist them. At this they exchanged silent but significant glances and then Serrena took the plunge.

  ‘We have to be married,’ she said. This took me all aback.

  ‘I am not sure what you mean by that,’ I replied cautiously.
‘Do you mean that you have been naughty, playing the beast with two backs, and now you have to be married to avoid the consequences?’

  ‘No! No! Don’t be daft, darling Tata. We have just had our first real fight because we have not been naughty.’

  ‘Now I am really confused,’ I admitted. ‘You will have to explain this to me.’

  ‘We have just had our first fight because I want to and Rameses won’t do it. He says he has given his word to my mother not to do it with me until we are married.’

  ‘Didn’t you also give your word, Serrena?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t think it meant forever,’ she said wistfully. ‘I have waited a year already, and that is long enough. I can’t wait another day. I am very sorry, Tata, but you have to marry us tonight!’

  ‘How about tomorrow?’ I procrastinated. ‘Give me a chance to get accustomed to the idea?’

  She shook her head. ‘Tonight!’ she repeated.

  ‘Will you allow me to finish my wine?’

  She nodded. ‘Of course I will! After you marry us.’

  ‘Where have you chosen for that auspicious event?’

  ‘In my garden, where all the gods can see us and give us their approval.’

  ‘Very well,’ I capitulated. ‘It will be a great honour for me to officiate!’

  I made it a lovely ceremony. I reduced all three of us to happy tears with the beauty of my words. When I pronounced the fatal words, ‘Now in the sight of all the gods I pronounce you man and wife,’ the two of them disappeared like smoke in a high wind. I did not see them again for some time. When at last I did they were still holding hands, but I am not suggesting that is all they had been doing during the two intervening days.

  ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘I hope you are satisfied at last?’

  ‘If only I had had any inkling of just how marvellous it really is I would have married Rameses the very same day I met him,’ she replied seriously. ‘Thank you ten thousand times, Tata. It surpassed all of my most extravagant expectations.’

  On the third day after Utteric had left Luxor I deemed that it was safe for us to make a reconnaissance of the city. Rameses and I selected ten men whom we knew well and trusted completely from those who had taken shelter in the Garden of Joy. We all took a vow of secrecy in the event of our capture. We would go to our deaths without surrendering any information. We split up and approached the city gates individually. Almost immediately I was alarmed by the attitude of the guards. They were much more alert than I had ever seen them previously. So much so that Rameses and I decided when we were still some distance away that we should not take the chance of trying to enter the city. We took one of the tracks that bypassed the gates where a crowd had gathered seeking entrance but were being meticulously checked and minutely searched by the guards before they were allowed in.

  From a safe distance we lingered amongst the idlers outside the walls and watched the proceedings. We saw one of our companions seized and marched away by the sentries. They had obviously recognized him as one of those who had been arrested at the city stadium on the day when Utteric had proved his invincibility by surviving assassination by the hidden archer. Yet we saw two of our other companions pass by the guards and allowed to enter the city. Nevertheless, we decided not to take any further chances and we recalled our companions who were still waiting in line to enter the city. Then all of us withdrew discreetly and, still moving individually, made our way back to the Garden of Joy. Here we waited anxiously for our two companions who had managed to pass the scrutiny of the guards to return to the garden. This they managed to do just before sundown when the city gates closed. Nevertheless we still lost one of our best men. We never saw him again, and we could only presume that he was tortured and executed out of hand by Panmasi’s thugs. If this was his fate he did not betray us and we were never placed in peril by his confessions to his captors.

  The two men who returned safely from the city were also fine fellows. They were brothers named Shehab and Mohab. They had been able to contact their friends, relatives and compatriots in the city and from them garnered vital information. The person that Utteric had left in command during his absence was none other than General Panmasi: the same felon and outlaw who had captured Serrena and spirited her out of Lacedaemon. However, I was given pause by the fact that he was indubitably also a cunning and devious adversary.

  From the two brothers we learned that General Panmasi probably had no more than three or four hundred men under his command. Utteric had taken the rest of his army north with him to Abu Naskos to oppose Hurotas’ invasion. This indicated that Panmasi and Utteric had no reasonable idea of the numbers of the men we had liberated from their grasp. He must be convinced that their execution orders had been carried out to the letter by the dreaded Doog. They clearly had not the least notion that Doog was no longer in a position to slaughter any more innocents, and that his polished skull now decorated the portcullis of the Garden of Joy.

  I looked forward to disillusioning Panmasi at the very first opportunity.

  We began our planning within minutes of receiving the report of my two stalwart brothers, Shehab and Mohab. They had learned exactly where Panmasi had his men barracked and how many guards were placed on the city gates during the night when they were closed. Furthermore, and most importantly, they had learned that Rameses’ legend lived on and he and I were still fondly remembered in Upper Egypt, especially in Luxor for we were both sons of that city. So we were both determined to make the most of our popularity and use it to evict Panmasi without waiting for Hurotas’ army to capture Abu Naskos and then fight their way up the Nile to reach us in Luxor. This could take several months or even years.

  In the Garden of Joy we had been able to muster 382 men whom we had rescued from Utteric’s clutches. But most unfortunately we had very few weapons with which to arm them. However, our two spies had learned that before leaving Luxor Utteric had ordered his men to seize all the weapons that they could find in a house-to-house search of the city, other than those in the hands of his own troops. These illicit weapons were locked away and guarded by his men under Panmasi in a secure warehouse in the dock area, outside the main city walls.

  Included in this weapons cache were several hundred compound bows, and an appropriate number of long arrows with flint heads that were matched to the limbs of the bows. There were also a large number of bronze-bladed swords and daggers and over a hundred battle axes stored with the bows in the warehouse.

  On the night that we chose for our attack on the city of Luxor the moon was, most obligingly, reduced to a waning crescent that was due to set a little after midnight. This suited our purpose admirably. It gave us ample light for our approach march on the harbour warehouse, and then it set when we needed utter darkness for our ultimate attack. Our raiding party was divided into platoons each linked together by a rope of appropriate length to prevent them becoming separated in the darkness. The two men leading each platoon were armed with sledgehammers to smash open the doors to the warehouses when we reached them. The docks were a sufficient distance from the city walls not to alert the guards there with the sounds of the hammer blows, and these were further muffled by the intervening hillock.

  We set off from the Garden of Joy an hour after the sunset. The platoons followed each other at short intervals, maintaining a steady pace so as to arrive at our goal in good order. When we reached the docks we threw off the linking ropes and crept up silently on the doors of the storehouse. When the word was quietly passed back that all three teams were in position I gave my notoriously piercing two-fingered whistle. This was followed immediately by the thudding of muffled sledgehammers, the crashes of the warehouse doors being burst open and the confused shouts of the sentries within, rudely awakened from their slumbers and just as swiftly being returned to oblivion by the blows of the same hammers.

  When the last sentry was silenced we waited anxiously with heads cocked and ears pricked for the sounds of further alarm and panic from an
enemy that we may have overlooked. But gradually we relaxed as the silence persisted and was then replaced by the scraping of flints as we lit our oil lamps. The wicks flared and we looked about us; we found ourselves in a long room filled with the weapons of war that had been hurriedly stacked in untidy piles down the full length of the floor.

  ‘Help yourselves, my friends, but be quick about it. We have a long night’s work ahead of us,’ I told them and they spread out down the length of the room gathering up war bows and edged weapons from the piles of equipment; testing the tension of the bow limbs before they strung them with cat gut or trying the cutting edge of the swords against their thumbs. In the meantime Rameses and I kept on urging them to hurry and make their selections.

  Within a very short space of time the men trooped out of the store-room with recurved bows strung, bulging quivers of arrows slung across both of their shoulders and gleaming sidearms sheathed on their sword belts. At the whispered orders of our sergeants and captains they extinguished the oil lamps and fell into their formations once more. Then in close order we started up the cobbled street towards the main gates of the city. When we reached them they were locked and cross-bolted but apparently deserted. The men that followed Rameses and me took cover in the drainage ditch down both sides of the road, while we went forward and I pressed my ear to the door to listen. The silence continued. I drew my dagger from its sheath and knocked lightly with the hilt on the woodwork using the agreed call sign: three sets of three knocks repeated thrice.

  It was answered at once. I moved across to the peephole and waited until the cover over the aperture was lifted from the far side and one of Shehab’s bright yellow eyes caught the starlight and flashed as he peered out at me.

  ‘How are our mutual friends?’ I asked softly.

  ‘Sleeping!’ he replied as softly, and closed the cover in my face. I heard him fiddling with the locking bar on the inside of the wicket. The wicket door finally swung open. It was a narrow single entrance, just large enough to admit one man at a time if he ducked his head and kept the bow slung on his shoulder clear. I glanced beyond Shehab’s grinning face and by the dim light of the few oil lamps set in the woodwork of the portcullis I could make out the somnolent figures of the gate guards. One or two of them were snoring peacefully. Another was holding one of the red wine jugs that I had given to Shehab the previous day. However, the jug was now empty and he held it upside down clutched to his chest. Like the rest of his comrades he was showing no interest in any of his surroundings. The juice of the Red Sheppen with which I had spiked the wine is a potent soporific.