by Wilbur Smith
With the fear and the thirst he lost track of time, and it seemed that years had passed. Nefer aroused himself from the stupor that was slowly overtaking him. He realized that something had changed. He tried to fathom what it was, but his mind was numb and unresponsive. Mintaka was very still beside him. He squeezed her fearfully. In reply he felt a tiny shudder of movement. She was still alive. Both of them were alive, but entombed, able only to move some small part of their bodies.
He felt himself drifting back into that dark stupor, into haunted dreams of water, of cool green expanses of the great river, of cascades and bright rivulets of water. He forced himself up from the darkness, and listened. He heard nothing. That was what had roused him. There was no sound. The roaring clamor of the khamsin had given way to a profound silence. The silence of a sealed tomb, he thought, and the horror returned full force.
He began to struggle again, to try to work his way out of the sand. He managed at last to free his right arm, reached out and found Mintaka’s covered head. He stroked it and in the silence heard her whimper. He tried to speak, to reassure her, but his swollen tongue would let no word pass. Instead he reached out beyond her to see if he could touch Hilto, who had been sitting on the far side of her. Hilto either was gone or was beyond the reach of his arm, for he touched nothing.
He rested awhile, then roused himself once more, and made an effort to clear the sand from around the entrance to the cave. But there was little space to store what he scraped away. A handful at a time he scooped it away and pushed it into a nook in their tiny cell. Soon he was working at the farthest reach of his right arm, scraping away a few grains at a time. It was a despairing attempt, but he knew that he had to keep trying or give up hope.
Abruptly he felt the sand cascade out from under his fingers, and even through the folds of his headcloth fresh air that had not been breathed seeped into the cave. And he was aware of the faintest glimmer of light beyond his closed eyelids. Painfully he began to pull away the cloth from his face. The light grew stronger and the air was sweet in his dry mouth and aching lungs. When his face was free of the cloth he half opened one eye, and was almost dazzled by the light. When his vision had adjusted he saw that he had opened a hole to the outside that was no larger than the circle of his thumb and forefinger, but from beyond there was quiet. The storm had passed.
Excited and with new hope he tugged at the cloth that covered Mintaka’s head and heard her breathe the fresh air. Again he tried to speak, but again his voice failed him. He tried to move, to escape from the deadly grip of the heavy sand, but his body was still encased to the armpits.
With all his remaining strength, he struggled silently to free himself, but the effort soon exhausted him and his throat burned and ached with thirst. He thought how cruel it would be to die here with the promise of air and light mocking him through that tiny cleft.
He closed his eyes again wearily, giving up. Then he was aware of another change in the light, and he opened his eye again. With a sense of disbelief he saw a hand reaching through the opening toward him. An ancient hand, with desiccated skin covered with the dark blotches of age.
“Nefer!” He heard a voice so strange, so hoarse and altered, that for a moment he doubted it was the Magus. “Nefer, can you hear me?”
Nefer tried to reply but still could not speak. He reached out and touched Taita’s fingers. Immediately the old man’s fingers closed over his with surprising strength.
“Hold hard. We will dig you out.”
He heard other voices then, rough and faint with thirst and effort, and hands scraped away the sand that entrapped him until at last they could lay hold of him and pull him free of the soft, deadly grasp of the sand.
Nefer slithered out through the narrow cleft as though the rocky hillock was giving birth to him. Then Hilto and Meren reached in again and dragged Mintaka out of the soft, dark womb into the brilliant sunlight.
They lifted the pair to their feet and held them from falling again, for their legs had no strength. Nefer shrugged off Meren’s hands, lurched across to Mintaka and embraced her silently. She was shivering as though in the crisis of malaria. After a while he held her at arm’s length and studied her face with horror and pity. Her hair was white with sand, which clung thickly in her eyebrows. Her eyes had receded into deep purple cavities, and her lips were swollen black, so that when she tried to speak they cracked open and a drop of blood, bright as a ruby, trickled down her chin.
“Water,” Nefer managed to articulate at last. “She must have water.”
He dropped to his knees and began frantically to dig into the sand that still blocked the cave. Meren and Hilto were working beside him and they uncovered the waterskin. They pulled it out, and found that most of the water that had remained had evaporated or been squeezed from it. There remained only sufficient for a few mouthfuls each, but even that amount was enough to keep them alive a little longer. Nefer felt strength return to his dehydrated body, and for the first time looked about him.
It was the middle of the morning. He did not know what morning or for how many days they had been buried. There was still a haze of fine sand like gold-dust in the still air.
He shaded his eyes, looked out over the desert and did not recognize it. The landscape had changed completely: the high dunes had marched away to be replaced by others, of different shape and alignment. There were valleys where there had been mountains, and vales where hills had stood. Even the colors had changed: the sullen purples and bruised blues had been replaced by reds and golden yellows.
He shook his head in wonder, and looked at Taita. The Magus was leaning on his staff, watching Nefer with those pale, ancient but ageless eyes.
“Trok?” Nefer managed to say. “Where?”
“Buried,” Taita replied, and now Nefer could see that he also was dried out like a stick of firewood, and suffering the same agonies as they were.
“Water?” Nefer whispered, touching his swollen and bleeding mouth.
“Come,” said Taita.
Nefer took Mintaka’s hand and slowly they followed the Magus out into the brazen sands. Now at last thirst and exposure had taken their toll on Taita and he moved slowly and stiffly. The others staggered along behind him.
Taita seemed to be wandering aimlessly through the new valleys of fine sand that ran beneath their feet. He held out his staff in front of him, making a sweeping motion with it. Once or twice he lowered himself to his knees and touched the earth with his forehead.
“What is he doing?” Mintaka whispered. The water they had drunk had not been enough to sustain her and she was weakening again. “Is he praying?”
Nefer only shook his head: he would not squander his own meager reserves by speaking unnecessarily. Taita moved on slowly, and by the way he was sweeping with his staff Nefer was reminded of a water-diviner at work.
Once again Taita knelt and placed his face close to the earth. This time Nefer watched him with more attention, and saw that he was not praying but sniffing the air close to the surface of the sand. Then he knew what Taita was doing. “He is searching for the buried chariots of Trok’s division,” he whispered to Mintaka. “His staff is his divining rod, and he is sniffing for the scent of putrescence below the sand.”
Taita stood up painfully and nodded at Hilto. “Dig here,” he ordered.
They all crowded forward and began to scrape away the loose sand with cupped hands. They had not far to go. An arm’s span deep they struck something hard, and redoubled their efforts. Quickly they exposed the wheel rim of a chariot that was lying on its side. Another few minutes of frantic digging and they pulled out a waterskin. They stared at it in despair, for it had burst open, perhaps when the chariot had capsized. It was dry, and though they squeezed it frantically it yielded not a single drop of the precious fluid.
“There must be another.” Nefer spoke through dry swollen lips. “Dig deeper.”
They clawed at the sand in a last despairing burst of strength, and as the excavat
ion deepened the stench of the dead horses in the traces grew stronger and more nauseating. They had been lying in the heat all these days.
Suddenly Nefer reached deeper into the hole and felt something soft and yielding. He pressed it and they all heard the gurgle and slosh of water. He swept away more of the loose sand and between them they lifted out a bulging waterskin. They were mumbling and whimpering with thirst as Taita opened the stopper and poured it into the leather bucket that had lain beside the waterskin in the bottom of the excavation.
The water was the temperature of blood, but when Taita held the bucket to Mintaka’s lips she closed her eyes and drank in a quiet ecstasy.
“Not too much at first,” Taita warned her, took the bucket from her and passed it to Nefer. They drank in turn, then Mintaka drank again, and the bucket made another circuit.
In the meantime Taita left them to continue his search. In a short time he called them to dig again. This time they were lucky: not only was the chariot under less sand, but there were three waterskins, and none was damaged.
“The horses now,” Taita told them, and they looked at each other guiltily. In their desperate preoccupation they had forgotten the animals. Carrying the waterskins, they trudged back through the sand to the base of the cliff.
The narrow gully in which they had pegged down the horses must have been well aligned to avoid the full force of the khamsin. When they began to dig, using the wooden spade they had found among the equipment of the buried chariot, they found the first horse almost at once. However, the stink warned them what to expect. The beast was dead and its stomach ballooned with gas. They left it and dug for the next animal.
This time they were more fortunate. It was a mare, the most willing and robust of the horses they had captured at the sinking sands. She was alive, but barely so. They cut the retaining halter that had held her down, but she was too weak to come to her feet unaided. The men lifted her between them. She stood weak and shivering, reeling and threatening to fall again, but she drank greedily from the bucket Mintaka held for her and seemed at once to improve.
In the meantime the men were digging for the other horses. They found two more dead of thirst or suffocation, but another two still alive. They also responded immediately when they were given water.
They left Mintaka to care for the three pathetic beasts and went back to the chariots they had uncovered to find fodder. They brought back bags of grain and another waterskin.
“You are doing good work with them,” Nefer told Mintaka, as he stroked the mare’s neck, “but I fear they are too far gone ever to pull another chariot.”
She rounded on him fiercely: “I will bring all of them through, I swear to the goddess. There must be hundreds more fodder bags and waterskins out there under the sand. We may have to stay here many more days, but when we leave, these gallant creatures will take us out.”
Nefer laughed at her through his cracked, scabbed lips. “I am in deep awe of your passionate nature.”
“Then provoke me no further,” she warned him, “or you will see more proof of it.” It was the first time she had smiled since the passing of the khamsin. “Now go back to help the others. We cannot have too great a supply of water.”
He left her, and went down into the sands where Taita was divining farther afield. Not all the Hyksos chariots were so lightly covered with sand as the ones they had first found. Many were hidden forever beneath the high new dunes.
They moved farther and farther away from the rocky hillock as the search went on. Beneath the sands they found many corpses, swollen bellies stinking.
Soon they were out of earshot of where Mintaka was tending the horses like a syce.
The cessation of all sound roused Trok, and he groaned as he tried to move. The sand was a stifling weight upon him. It seemed to crush in his ribs and force the breath from his lungs. Nevertheless, he knew that the spot Ishtar had chosen for them to ride out the storm was, by either chance or design, a good one. In any other place they might have been buried forever. Here he had been able to keep close to the surface of the earth. In the past days as the layers of blown sand had built up over him and the weight had become unbearable he had managed to wriggle free, leaving only enough covering him to protect him from the full abrasive force of the khamsin.
Now he struggled up toward the light and air like a diver coming up from the depths of a deep pool. As he swam up laboriously through the sand his damaged shoulder was a burning agony. He struggled on until his head, still swathed in folds of cloth, broke free. He unwrapped it and blinked about him in the dazzling light. The wind had passed, but the air was luminous with fine particles of suspended dust. He rested like that for a while until the pain in his shoulder abated a little. Then he pushed aside the layer of sand that still covered his lower body and tried to call out, “Ishtar! Where are you?” but his voice was a formless croak. He turned his head slowly and saw the Mede, sitting near him, his back to the rocky cliff face. He looked like an exhumed corpse that had been dead for days. Then Ishtar opened his one good eye.
“Water?” Trok’s voice was only just intelligible, but the Mede shook his head.
“So we have survived the storm just to die in the same grave,” Trok tried to say, but no sound came out from his ravaged throat and mouth.
He lay for a while longer, and felt any instinct to survive being extinguished under the slow seep of exhaustion and resignation. It would be so much easier just to close his eyes and drift off to sleep, never to wake again. That thought spurred him and he forced open his crusted eyelids, felt the grit under the lids scraping at his eyeballs.
“Water,” he said. “Find water.”
Using the cliff side as a support he lurched to his feet and stood there swaying, hugging his useless arm to his chest.
Ishtar watched him, his one blind eye like that of a reptile or a corpse. Trok started forward drunkenly, bumping into the cliff at every few paces he took, making his way along the base of the rock until he could look out over the desert. The dunes were pristine and unblemished, as voluptuously curved as the body of a lovely young girl.
There was no trace of men or vehicles. His fighting divisions, the finest in all Egypt, had vanished without a trace. He tried to lick his lips, but there was no spittle in his chalky mouth. He felt his legs give way under him and knew that if he went down he would never rise again. Using the wall of stone as a support he tottered on, not knowing where he was going and with no thought in his head but to go on.
Then he heard human voices, and knew he was hallucinating. There was silence again. He went a few steps farther, stopped and listened. The voices came again. This time they were closer and clearer. He felt unexpected strength flow back into his body, but when he tried to call out no sound came from his parched throat. There was silence once more. The voices had ceased.
He started forward again, then stopped suddenly. A woman’s voice, no mistaking it. A sweet, clear voice.
Mintaka. The name formed silently on his swollen lips. Then another voice. This time a man’s. He could not make out the words or recognize the speaker, but if he was with Mintaka he must be one of the fugitives Trok had been pursuing. The enemy.
Trok looked down at himself. His sword-belt was gone, and his weapons with it. He was unarmed, dressed only in his tunic, which had so much sand in the weave that it chafed his skin like a hair-shirt. He looked around him for a weapon, a stick or a stone, but there was nothing. The scree had been covered by sand.
He stood undecided, and the voices came again. Mintaka and the man were in a gully among the rocks. While he still hesitated he heard the sand crunching like salt crystals under someone’s feet. That person was coming down the gully toward where Trok stood.
Trok shrank back against the stone wall and a man emerged from the mouth of the gully, twenty paces from where Trok hid. The stranger set off with a determined stride into the dunes. He was strongly familiar, but recognition eluded Trok until the man turned and called back t
oward the gully, “Do not tax yourself unduly, Mintaka. You have come through a trying ordeal.” Then he walked on.
Trok gaped after him. He is dead, he thought. It cannot be him. The message from Naja was clear…. He considered the possibility that a djinn or some evil spirit was impersonating the young Pharaoh Nefer Seti as he watched the young man go out into the desert. Then, through eyes bleary with sand, he saw him join three others, among them the unmistakable figure of the Warlock, who, Trok realized, must be responsible, in some strange and miraculous way, for the resurrection of Nefer Seti. But now he had neither the time nor the inclination to ponder this further. There was only one thought in his mind and that was water.
As stealthily as he could he crept forward into the gully where he had heard Mintaka’s voice and peered round the corner of the cliff. He did not recognize her at first: she was as bedraggled as a peasant. Her hair and her tattered tunic were stiff with sand, and her eyes were sunken and bloodshot. She was kneeling at the head of one of a small herd of horses, holding a water bucket for it to drink.
Water was the only thing Trok could think about. He could smell it and his whole body craved it. He staggered toward Mintaka. Her back was turned to him and the soft sand covered the sound of his approach. She was not aware of him until he seized her arm. She turned, saw him and screamed. He snatched the bucket from her hands and knocked her down. As his arm was useless, he knelt on the small of her back to pin her down, while he drank from the bucket.
He swallowed huge gulps, gurgled and belched, then drank some more. Mintaka was wriggling under him and screaming, “Nefer! Taita! Help me.”
He belched again, pushed her face into the sand to silence her and swallowed the last drops from the bucket. He looked around him, still crouching over her like a lion on his kill. He saw the waterskin against the wall of the gully and the javelins and swords stacked beside it.