Warlock: A Novel of Ancient Egypt (Novels of Ancient Egypt)

by Wilbur Smith

  The lion was ripping at him with both his forepaws, the claws fully extended. Nefer wriggled and writhed beneath the heavy body, evading some of the claw strokes, but his apron was ripped from him, and he felt the bony hooks tearing into his flesh. He knew he could not hold out much longer. Involuntarily he screamed at the lion above him, “Leave me, you filthy creature! Get off me!”

  The lion was still roaring and the blood from his skewered palate blew out in a crimson cloud, mingled with his stinking breath and hot saliva, into Nefer’s face.

  His shouts galvanized Mintaka, and when she peered out from behind the bole of the thorn tree Nefer was a blood-soaked spectacle beneath the lion’s bulk. He was being mauled to death, and her own fear was forgotten.

  Nefer’s bow was trapped under his body, and without it the quiver full of arrows was useless to her. She sprang out from behind the tree and raced toward the chariot. The screams and roars behind her goaded her on and she ran until her heart seemed on the point of bursting.

  Ahead of her the horses were terrified by the scent of the beast and his roaring. They reared and threw their heads, kicking out at the traces. They would have bolted long ago had not Nefer secured the locking brake on one wheel so they could only turn in a tight, right-handed circle. Mintaka ran in under their flying hoofs, and jumped up onto the footplate. She seized the loose reins and called to the team, “Ho there, Stargazer! Hold hard, Hammer!”

  On many of their previous outings, Nefer had let her drive, so the horses knew her voice and recognized her touch on the traces. Swiftly she brought them under control, but it seemed to her an eternity, for she could hear Nefer’s screams and the lion’s deafening bellows. The moment she had the pair in hand she leaned over the side and knocked off the brake. She brought the horses round in a hard left-hand turn, then drove them forward straight at the lion and his victim.

  Hammer balked, but Stargazer held true. She snatched up the whip that Nefer had never used on them, and laid a stroke across Hammer’s glossy haunches that raised a welt as thick as her thumb.

  “Ha!” she yelled. “Pull, curse you, Hammer!”

  Startled, Hammer leaped forward, and they pounded down on the lion. All his attention was on the shrieking, writhing victim between his front paws, and he did not look up at the chariot bearing down on him.

  Mintaka dropped the whip, and instead snatched the long lance from its rack. She had carried it for Nefer during hours of hunting, and now it felt light and familiar in her right hand. Guiding the racing team with the reins in her left hand, she leaned far out over the side panel and raised the lance high. As they ran past the crouching lion, his head was lowered and the back of his neck was fully exposed. The exact juncture of spine and skull in the back of his neck was covered by the dense black bush of his mane, but she guessed at the spot and thrust down with all the strength of her fear and her love for Nefer.

  Her lance hand had the impetus of the flying chariot behind it. To her amazement the blade slid in readily, full length through the taut hide, and deep into the back of the animal’s neck. She felt the slight tick in her hand as the point found the joint between the vertebrae of the spine and went on to sever the spinal column.

  As the chariot raced past, the haft of the lance was plucked from her grip. But the lion collapsed in a loose, inert heap on top of Nefer. The beast did not twitch again, killed on the instant.

  It took her fifty cubits to bring the crazed horses to a halt, wheel them round and force them back to where Nefer lay beneath the huge carcass. She had the presence of mind to throw on the wheel brake before she jumped down from the footplate.

  It was obvious how badly Nefer was hurt. From the sheets of blood that covered him she thought he might even be dead. She fell to her knees beside him. “Nefer, speak to me. Can you hear me?”

  To her immense relief he rolled his head toward her and his eyes were open and focused. “You came back,” he breathed. “Bak-her, Mintaka, bak-her!”

  “I will get this off you.”

  She could see that the enormous weight of the dead beast was crushing the wind from his lungs. She jumped up and tugged at the lion’s head.

  “The tail,” Nefer whispered painfully through a running mask of blood. “Roll him over by the tail.”

  She was quick to obey him, and seized the long tufted tail, then heaved with all her strength. Slowly the hindquarters began to swing, the whole carcass flopped over, and Nefer was free.

  Mintaka knelt beside him and helped him into a sitting position, but he swayed drunkenly and reached out to her for support.

  “Hathor help me,” she pleaded. “You are desperately wounded. There is so much blood.”

  “Not all of it is mine,” he blurted, but from his right thigh rose a feathery crimson fountain where the claws had ripped open a blood vessel. Taita had instructed him long and earnestly in the treatment of war wounds, and he thrust his thumb down into the torn flesh and pressed until the jet of blood shriveled.

  “Get the waterskin,” he said, and Mintaka ran to the chariot and brought it back to him. She held it for him while he drank thirstily, and then, tenderly, she washed the blood and filth from his face, relieved to find it unmarked. However, when she inspected his other injuries she had difficulty in hiding her shock at how grievous they were.

  “My bedroll is in the chariot.” His voice was weaker. When she brought it to him he asked her to undo the bundle, where she found his housewife roll. She selected a needle and silk thread. He showed her how to tie off the spurting blood vessel. It was work that came easily to her, and she did not hesitate or flinch from it. Her hands were bloody to the wrists as, with nimble fingers, she pulled a thread around the open artery, then closed the deeper rents in his flesh. Still under his instruction she used strips torn from his tattered chiton to bind up the wounds. It was rough, rudimentary surgery, but sufficient to stem the worst of the bleeding.

  “That is all we can do now. I must help you into the chariot and get you to where a surgeon can do the rest. Oh, if only Taita were here.”

  She ran to Stargazer’s head and led the pair back to where Nefer lay. He was up on one elbow staring longingly at the carcass of the lion that lay beside him.

  “My first lion,” he whispered ruefully. “Unless we skin it, the trophy will spoil. The hair will slip and slough off.”

  In the heat of emotion and her terrible concern for him, she lost her temper. “That is the most stupid piece of man’s nonsense I have ever heard uttered. Would you risk your very life for a stinking bit of fur?” Angrily she came to help him to his feet. It took the extreme efforts of both of them to raise him up. He leaned on her with all his weight as he hobbled to the chariot and collapsed weakly onto the footplate.

  Mintaka used the sheepskin from the bedroll to make him as comfortable as she could, then climbed up and stood over him with the reins in her hands.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  “The rest of the squadron will be far up the valley by now, and they will be driving too fast for us to catch them. Also, they are heading in the wrong direction,” he told her. “The other hunters are scattered across the desert. We could search for them all day without finding them.”

  “We must return to where the fleet is lying at Dabba. There is a surgeon with the ships.” She had reached the only feasible conclusion, and he nodded. She urged the horses into a walk, and they left the grove and climbed to the high ground heading south once again.

  “It’s three hours or more to reach Dabba,” she said.

  “Not if we cut across the loop of the river,” he answered. “We can shorten the return by at least four leagues.”

  Mintaka hesitated and looked eastward into the bleak desert, which he wanted her to attempt. “I might lose the way,” she murmured fearfully.

  “I will guide you,” he answered, confident in the instruction that Taita had given him in desert travel. “It’s our best chance.”

  She swung the team to the left, mar
king a blue shale hillock in the direction Nefer had pointed out to her.

  When they were strong and well they both delighted in the motion of a chariot running hard over broken ground, and they rode the pitch and roll with young legs. But now, even though she kept the horses down to a walk or a trot, the collision with every stone or hump, the drop into every hole, was transmitted through the rigid chassis into Nefer’s torn body. He winced and sweated, but tried to hide his pain and discomfort from her. Yet as the hours wore on, his wounds stiffened, and the pain became unbearable. He groaned aloud at a particularly nasty impact, and slumped into unconsciousness.

  Immediately Mintaka reined the pair to a halt, and tried to revive him. She soaked a pad of linen with water and squeezed a few drops between his lips. Then she sponged his pale, sweating face. But when she tried to rebandage his wounds she found that the gash in his thigh was bleeding again. She worked to staunch it, but succeeded only in reducing it to a slow leak. “You are going to be all right, my darling,” she told him, with a confidence she did not feel. She embraced him gently, kissed the top of his dusty blood-caked head and took up the reins again.

  An hour later she gave the last of the water to Nefer and the horses, not drinking herself. Then she stood as high as she could on the dashboard of the chariot and looked about her at the gravel and shale hills that danced and wavered in the heat mirage. She knew she was lost. Have I drifted too far eastward? she wondered, glancing up at the sun and trying to calculate its angle. At her feet Nefer stirred and moaned, and she looked down with a brave face and smiled. “Not much further now, my heart. We should see the river over the next crest.”

  She rearranged the sheepskin from the bedroll under his head, then stood up, gathered the reins and braced herself. Suddenly she realized how exhausted she was: every muscle in her body ached and her eyes were sore and red from the sun’s glare and the dust. She forced herself and the team onward.

  Soon the horses were showing signs of distress. They had stopped sweating and the salt rime dried white across their backs. She tried to urge them into a trot, but they could not respond, so she climbed down, took the stallion’s head and led them on. Now she was staggering herself, but at last she found the tracks of a chariot in a sandy valley bottom, and her spirits lifted.

  “They are heading west,” she whispered, through lips that were beginning to swell and crack. “They will lead us back to the river.” She kept moving along the wheel ruts for some time, until she stopped in confusion as she found her own footprints in front of her. It took her some time to realize that she must have walked in a circle and was following her own tracks.

  At last despair overtook her. She sank down to her knees, helpless and lost, and whispered to Nefer as he lay, still unconscious, “I am sorry, my darling. I have failed you.” She stroked the matted hair from his face. Then she looked up at the low hilltop to the east, and blinked. She shook her head to clear her vision, glanced away to rest her burning eyes, then looked back. She felt her spirits surge upward once again, but still she could not be sure whether what she was seeing was illusion or reality.

  On the crest of the hills above them, a gaunt figure stood on the skyline, leaning on his long staff. His silver hair shone like a cloud, and the hot light breeze off the desert flapped his skirts against his heron-thin legs. He was staring down at them.

  “Oh, Hathor and all the goddesses, it can’t be so,” she whispered.

  Beside her, Nefer opened his eyes. “Taita is near,” he murmured. “I feel him close.”

  “Yes. Taita is here.” Her voice was faint, and she held her own throat in shock. “But how did he know where to find us?”

  “He knows. Taita knows,” Nefer replied, closed his eyes and slumped back into unconsciousness.

  The old man was striding down the rugged slope toward them now, and Mintaka pulled herself to her feet and tottered to meet him. Swiftly her fatigue fell away and she waved and screamed greetings at him, almost delirious with joy.

  Taita drove down the escarpment toward the river and the village of Dabba. The horses responded to his touch, moving to an easy motion that cosseted the wounded boy on the footplate. Taita seemed to have known with some deep instinct just what medicines and dressings Nefer would need, and he had carried these with him. After he had re-dressed the wounds he had led the horses to a hidden water seep nearby, where the bitter water had revived them. He had taken Mintaka up on the footplate and turned the horses’ heads unerringly in the direction of Dabba and the river.

  Beside him, Mintaka had pleaded with him, almost tearfully, to explain to her how he had known that they needed him, and where to find them. Taita had smiled gently, and called to the horses, “Gently now, Hammer! Steady, Stargazer!”

  On the floorboards Nefer was deep in the drugged sleep of the Red Shepenn, but his wounds were staunched, cleaned and bound with linen bandages.

  A red and angry sunset was fading over the Nile like a dying bush-fire. The boats of the fleet were still anchored in the stream, like children’s toys in the fading light.

  Apepi and Naja rode out to meet them from the village of Dabba. Lord Naja was highly agitated, and Apepi bellowed at his daughter as soon as they were in range of his bull voice, “Where have you been, you stupid child? Half the army is out looking for you.”

  Lord Naja’s agitation abated as soon as he came close enough to see Nefer bandaged and unconscious in the bottom of the chariot cockpit. He became almost sanguine when Taita explained to him the extent of Pharaoh’s injury.

  Barely conscious, Nefer was carried down to the riverbank on a litter and lifted gently aboard one of the galleys by a party of boatmen. “I want Pharaoh taken up to Thebes with all possible speed,” Taita told Naja, “even if it means a night journey. There is a very real danger that the wounds will putrefy. This happens with injuries received from one of the great cats. It is almost as though their fangs and claws are steeped in some virulent poison.”

  “You can order the galley to sail at once,” Naja said, in front of the company, but then took Taita’s arm and led him a short way along the riverbank to where they could not be overheard. “Bear in mind, Magus, the charge laid on you by the gods. Clearly I discern their divine intervention in these extraordinary circumstances. If Pharaoh were to die from his wounds no person in either kingdom would take it as unnatural.” He said no more but gazed into Taita’s face with those piercing yellow eyes.

  “The will of the gods will prevail against all else,” Taita agreed quietly, but enigmatically.

  Naja read in his reply what he wanted to hear. “We are in accord, Taita. I place my trust in you. Go in peace. I will follow you back to Thebes after Apepi has been taken care of.” The phrasing of this last remark struck Taita as unusual, but he was too distracted to ponder it. Naja smiled mysteriously and went on, “Who knows? We may have momentous news for each other when we meet again.”

  When Taita hurried back on board the galley, and went to the small deck cabin in which Nefer lay, he found Mintaka kneeling beside the litter in tears.

  “What is it, my darling?” he asked her gently. “You have been as brave as a lioness. You have fought like a warrior of the guards. How can you dissolve into despair now?”

  “My father is taking me back to Avaris in the morning, but I should be with Nefer. I am his betrothed. He needs me. We need each other.” She looked up at him piteously, and he could see that she was both physically and emotionally exhausted.

  She seized his hand. “Oh, Magus! Will you not go to my father and ask him to let me go back to Thebes to help you to take care of Nefer? My father will listen to you.”

  But Apepi snorted with laughter when Taita attempted to persuade him. “Place my lamb in Naja’s pen?” He shook his head with amusement. “I trust Naja as I would a scorpion. Who knows what tricks he would try if I gave him that coin to bargain with? As for that young puppy, Nefer, he would be up her skirts as quick as a hawk on a bustard, if he hasn’t traveled that ro
ad already.” He laughed again. “I don’t want to debase the currency of her virginity. No, Warlock, Mintaka comes back under my wing to Avaris until her wedding day. And none of your magic spells will change my mind on that.”

  Sadly Mintaka went to take her leave of Nefer. He was on the edge of consciousness, weak from the blood he had lost and the drug. But when she kissed him he opened his eyes. She spoke quietly, pledging her love, and he watched her eyes as she spoke. Before she rose to leave him, she took the golden locket that hung at her throat. “This contains a lock of my hair. It is my soul, and I give it to you.” She placed it in his hand and he folded his fingers tightly around it.

  So Mintaka stood alone on the bank of the Nile as the swift galley bearing Nefer and Taita breasted the current. With twenty oarsmen a side and a white curl under her prow she headed upstream toward Thebes. Mintaka did not wave at Taita’s tall silhouette on the stern, but watched him forlornly.

  The next morning there was a final meeting between Apepi and the Regent, Lord Naja, on board the Hyksosian royal barge. All Apepi’s nine sons were present and Mintaka was seated beside her father. Apepi had kept her on a tight rein since the previous evening when the ship bearing Pharaoh Nefer Seti had left. From long experience, he knew his headstrong daughter well enough to trust neither her judgment nor her sense of filial duty and obedience when she had set her heart on a course of action.

  The farewell ceremony took place on the deck of Apepi’s galley, with protestations of mutual trust and devotion to the peace.

  “May it last a thousand years!” Naja intoned, as he bestowed upon Apepi the Gold of Eternity, an honor he had created for this auspicious occasion.

  “A thousand times a thousand,” Apepi replied, with equal gravity, as the chain of the order, encrusted with precious and semi-precious gems, was placed around his shoulders. The Regent and the King embraced with the affection of brothers, then Naja was rowed across to his own galley. As the two fleets diverged, one to return to Thebes, the other to run down with the current hundreds of leagues to Memphis and Avaris, the crews cheered each other out of sight. Garlands and wreaths of palm fronds and blossoms tossed from one vessel toward the other bestrewed the surface of the wide river.