by N. L. Holmes
They waited in silence for what seemed like an endless afternoon until Hani had a sense that perhaps they had overestimated the urgency of their situation. The sun was sinking into the sea, at its feet a dazzling path of light that seemed to lead right into the incandescent golden heart of itself. The great Amen-Ra would be the witness to their defense. Lord Ra, look mercifully on us. He could see the men around him getting restless from standing alert for so long. No doubt, they had to pee, and they needed water. They wanted to close their eyes for a minute. Then, just as the sun slid into its own golden juices, the birds stopped singing abruptly, and the hapiru attacked.
They came pouring out of the woods and rocks and bushes, places where no man should have been able to hide. They shrieked and uttered spine-chilling ululations, waving their axes and clubs, a few of them with swords. The archers on the boulders rose and took aim, but one of them quickly toppled into the crowd, pierced through by someone else’s arrow.
Now the fear hit Hani. His stomach fluttered, and his anus clenched. He and his staff were in the middle so that the soldiers would be the first line of defense, but it was worse to watch the battle than to take part, so strong was the delusion of being able to save oneself.
Pa-aten-em-heb’s men flailed away with ax and sword, but the hapiru kept pouring out of the brush and rocks to either side. How can there be so many? Hani saw clearly that he would have to join the active fray at any minute. A sword cut whistled alongside his ear, and he loosed a mighty swing of his club. Blood sprayed over him, his own or someone else’s. He was in the thick of the fight, slashing, smashing, the breath sawing in his nose. Fear had turned into the mindless desperation of battle. A man arched and fell beside him, pierced by an arrow from above that sprouted, swaying, from the middle of his back. Others grunted with effort—or screamed as they received a bone-shattering blow. A soldier fell against Hani and almost pulled him down, but the man rose and pressed off into the melee once more. Hani was conscious of nothing outside his little circle of vision. As soon as anyone approached, he laid on him with his club until he was gasping and panting for breath. Then all at once, as if someone had opened a stopcock, the hapiru drained away, melting into the brush or hightailing it back uphill by the road.
Hani dropped his club and stood, swaying, trying to catch his breath. He didn’t seem to be bleeding, although his arm felt as if it had been wrenched from its socket. Exhaustion crushed him; sweat ran into his eyes. But he wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even injured.
“I’m too old for this.” He gasped, staring around. He needed to account for his staff, none of whom he could see, and above all for Maya. The fear was back, pushing his heart into his throat. “Maya,” he called, his throat so dry he could hardly yell. “Where are you, son?”
From somewhere lower down the road, In-her-khau came staggering up, to all appearances unhurt, but his dark face was downright pallid with horror. “Tuy is dead, Lord Hani,” he stammered, then he began to cry.
Hani put a weary arm of comfort around his shoulders. “Help me find the others. We need to know who’s alive and who else is dead. Have you seen Maya, my friend?”
“Yes, but that was early on. He was swinging his bronze rod at people’s knees, taking them down.”
Early on. Hani was left with a flutter of trepidation in his middle. “Round up as many of ours as you can find uphill, and I’ll look downhill.” If In-her-khau had seen him, Maya must have ended up lower on the road. But darkness was falling fast. Hani trudged down the slope, edging around the wagons, shouting, “Maya! Maya, where are you?”
Pa-aten-em-heb intercepted him after a few cubits. He was sweaty and red-faced, and his arm was bound up in a bloody scarf. “Hani, we’re going to have to get out of here soon—we can’t navigate the road in the dark, and we certainly can’t stay here.”
“What about the wounded?”
“The men are carrying them to the wagons. We’ll leave the dead until we can come back to bury them.” No doubt seeing Hani’s wild face, the officer said more gently, “We have no choice, my lord.”
“Have you seen Maya?” Hani hardly dared to ask even so much. What he wanted to say was “Dead or alive?” but the words wouldn’t come.
“No, I haven’t. But your slave and his family are alive.”
The twilight was deep now; night was closing in, and all efforts to identify the fallen would soon end perforce. Instead, the soldiers pulled the bodies off the road to permit the passage of the carts. Of the twenty or so unmoving forms stretched out on the sloping ground around him, most appeared to be hapiru or other locals. A stunned-looking soldier was sitting up, holding his ear, the blood trickling through his fingers.
“Have you seen a dwarf anywhere?”
The man just stared at him, glassy-eyed with pain.
Anxiety was a ticking pulse in Hani’s throat. How can I ever face Sat-hut-haru if anything has happened to Maya? He overturned corpse after corpse, knowing full well not one of them was his son-in-law. And now it was night in good earnest. Torches sprang to life here and there. The men had hitched the donkeys back to the carts and loaded the pack animals. Pa-aten-em-heb was shouting orders, and anyone who could still walk was forming up. I can’t leave him. But Hani knew that there would be no finding anyone in the dark. With a lump of lead for a heart, he rose and joined the halting procession.
They moved slowly by the light of their torches down the narrow road twisting its way into the tunnel of darkness ahead of them. In a slight breeze, the leaves rustled with a dry, ghostly sound. The not-quite-full moon—the injured eye of Haru, the one his brother, the god of chaos, had wounded—rose, blotting out the friendly stars, shedding a cold, unreal light that made bright patches and shadows on the road. Hani was stunned with hopelessness. He hadn’t found Maya among the dead, but neither did he seem to be among the living. What could have happened? To his shame, Hani realized that he was more distraught about his son-in-law’s disappearance than he was about the death of his translator, Tuy. I should never have encouraged him to arm—any of them. They’re scribes, not soldiers.
Pa-aten-em-heb drew alongside Hani and said quietly, “I didn’t want to spend the night up there in case our friends planned to come back, but we can’t go far at this pace. It’s too dangerous along this stretch of the road. One of the carts is likely to miss a turn. And the men are tired, and many have lost blood.”
“Anytime you want to make camp, I’m ready.” Hani tried to force a smile, but he hadn’t the heart for it.
The two of them walked elbow to elbow for a while—through the leaves of the trees, the moonlight white blotches on their shoulders as if the darkness were peeling off like the bark of a plane tree. Eventually, the officer asked under his breath, “Did you ever find Maya, my lord?”
Hani shook his head, his throat constricting.
“He’ll turn up,” Pa-aten-em-heb said with feeling. He strode ahead. “We’ll make camp here, men!”
⸎
Maya was in the midst of the melee, swinging his bronze rod at the legs of the men around him, darting in and out like a terrier, maddening and distracting his prey. At some point, he dodged under a sword swipe and was retreating to attack elsewhere when, in the gathering darkness, he tripped backward over a prone body. His heart in his mouth, he fell heavily on his bottom and dropped his rod.
Immediately, two men were on him, crushing him to the ground. He cried out, “Lord Hani! Help me!” but he had no idea where Hani was—or even if he was any longer. Maya fought desperately, kicking and biting, but the men were too much for him. One of them twisted his arms behind him and pinned him tight. Maya glimpsed a battle-ax raised over his head and felt, in a split second, the terror of imminent death. Then, before he could so much as murmur Sat-hut-haru’s name, everything went black.
When Maya awoke, it was daybreak. He found himself lying on the ground, bound and gagged. His shirt had been torn off rudely, its tattered neck still around him like a collar. His arms and che
st were scratched and laced with fine, stinging lines of dried blood. His head hurt murderously. Maya remembered the ax lifted over him and thought in a panic that his skull must be split, but surely, he would have been dead under such a blow. He decided that the man must have struck him with the flat of his blade. Where am I? Did they drag me here?
He sat up and, once the wave of pain and nausea had ebbed, stared around. He was somewhere in the forest. An encampment was spread around him—white linen tents and brown leather ones and shelters made of old blankets—taking advantage of the natural clearing beneath the huge oaks and plane trees. It was impossible to tell how many people it might harbor. A few men were stirring in the early dawn’s half-light, talking occasionally in quiet voices. They seemed to be speaking the language of Djahy. The hapiru have me, Maya thought. It made sense that it should be they. What didn’t make sense was that they had taken him captive rather than killed him. Will they try to extort ransom from Lord Hani?
The morning wore on, and Maya’s stomach began to gripe with hunger. After a while, a man in a threadbare woolen tunic, an ax and a knife tucked into his sash, approached. Maya made furious noises from under his gag but could shape no words. The man squatted at his side, grinning through scattered black stumps of teeth. “Mornin’, little man. You hungry?” His hands and arms were as hairy as a monkey’s.
Maya nodded vigorously. Thanks be to all the gods I’ve managed to learn the language of this place. With luck, he might overhear something that could be useful. The man took the short knife from its scabbard at his waist and sliced the rag that was tied around Maya’s mouth.
Maya blurted, “Why have you taken me captive?”
The man chuckled. “Because you’re cute. You’ll make a good slave. You c’n dance and prance around, and people will pay to own you.”
Maya’s face grew hot with indignation. “I most assuredly will not! I’m a royal scribe.”
“You was, little man. Now you’re a slave. An’ be glad we didn’t jes’ kill you, like we done a bunch o’ the others.”
Maya hoped with all his soul that Lord Hani wasn’t among that number. They’d been split up in the fray, and he hadn’t seen his father-in-law again after things heated up. Maya said nothing, his outrage giving way to gnawing anxiety. Sat-hut-haru would never forgive him if he let anything happen to her father. But then, Maya might well be dead himself in short order...
His captor got to his feet and headed off, hopefully for the promised food. Maya tried to make himself more comfortable, but his ankles were shackled as well as his wrists, and he couldn’t even cross his legs. He craned around at the encampment. There was no way he could hop his way to safety. He grew less hopeful by the moment.
The swine. Buying and selling human beings. He remembered how the cowed slaves of the commissioner had been trained by brutality that they were worthless wretches. He resolved that he would never submit to dancing and prancing. Better to die with dignity, his pen case proudly over his shoulder.
After what seemed like an inordinately long time, during which Maya observed more and more of the hapiru rising and setting about their tasks, Maya’s monkey-armed captor returned with a bowl of something that steamed in the chill of morning. He set it down just outside of Maya’s reach and said, “I’m gonna free your hands now, but don’t you be gettin’ no ideas.” True to his word, he drew out his knife once more and severed the rope that bound Maya’s wrists. They’d been chafed raw in places, and Maya rubbed them in an agony of relief as the blood came rushing back.
Monkey Arms turned to go, and Maya cried, “Aren’t you going to give me the food?”
The hapir chuckled. “Figure out how to get it, little man.” He headed away into the increasingly busy encampment.
Steaming with anger that helped to drive away his fear, Maya rolled over onto his stomach and thence rose to his knees, but he couldn’t even crawl because of the tightness of his hobble. He pulled himself forward laboriously with his short arms until he could reach the bowl of porridge. By that time, he was exhausted as well as hungry, but he scooped up the cooling mass feverishly with his fingers and stuffed it into his mouth.
Sated but still thirsty, he observed the activity around him. The only people he saw were men, so despite its size, this was probably a raiding party, not a home encampment. Did they intend to rob us and were thwarted by the military presence, or was it a deliberate attack on an emissary? Did they kill Lord Hani, or is he, too, a prisoner somewhere in the camp?
How easily Maya himself might have been lying dead in the road. Lord Bes, thank you for your protection. Maya reached for the gold amulet around his neck... but it wasn’t there. His heart sank. What a terrible omen. It had saved his life once. Where has it gone? he asked himself, distraught. From the condition of his shirt and the scratches all over him, he seemed to have been dragged through the brush at some point—perhaps it had fallen off then.
He hung his head. Suddenly, all the discouragement that he’d been holding at bay toppled in upon him, and the realization sank in that he might well find himself the slave of some brigand chief, reduced to cutting capers in the stereotypical role of the dwarf jester. After all his efforts to get an education, to rise through the ranks of the royal chancery, to become someone with a fine future... this.
And Lord Hani. His father-in-law wouldn’t know where to look for him. That Hani himself might be dead or captured was somehow beyond his ability to accept. Hani was a rock of solidity, the bulwark of those around him, strong and comforting and fatherly. Tears were burning in Maya’s nose. His life was as good as over. Perhaps he would have been better off killed outright. But to die here in a foreign land, with no hope of a proper burial, so that his soul would wander through a painful eternity—and leave Sat-hut-haru and the children orphaned...
No. It mustn’t be. I have to get out of here. The thought made him grit his teeth with resolve, chasing away self-pity.
The morning wore on. Maya got to his feet occasionally just to relieve his buttocks. And as for relieving other things, Monkey Arms let him hop a brief way into the woods, knowing he wasn’t able to run off. Maya couldn’t guess how long he’d lain unconscious, so he didn’t know how much time had passed since his capture. He wondered where his fellow travelers were by now—if they’d made it to Azzati and would be coming to his rescue with a company of the high commissioner’s soldiers. He tried to evaluate the best way to sever his bonds and sneak away, but he was in plain sight all the time. After a listless morning, during which no one seemed to be doing much but resting up after the battle, a bowl of the same disgusting porridge marked the arrival of midday.
Almost as soon as one of the brigands had taken away Maya’s empty bowl, an alarm seemed to run through the encampment. People dropped their tasks and began to rush around, seeking their weapons. Shouts sounded here and there, urging the men to assume their positions, although Maya noticed that quite a few of them took to their heels and melted into the forest. He sprang to his feet, hope fluttering inside, with its wild, fragile wings, for the first time since his capture. It must be Hani and the soldiers!
But before he could even hop toward the edges of the clearing, a band of men came bursting into camp, and to Maya’s confusion, they were dressed not in the white uniforms of Kemet’s soldiers but in a motley assortment of colored civilian tunics, like the men of Djahy. Whooping and yelling, they descended upon the hapiru, who hardly had time to find their weapons before they were clubbed into submission or fled into the forest. It was hardly a battle. The invaders seemed rather jolly, laughing at their captives and mocking them, enjoying slapping them around.
Maya fell to his stomach and tried to drag himself into the trees before the newcomers could see him, but a voice called out, “One’s about to get away.”
A hand grabbed Maya by the waist of his kilt, picked him up off the ground, and set him upright. His heart pounding, he faced the man defiantly.
“Look what we have here, boys,” said t
he man, grinning. He was about Maya’s age, a thickset, muscular specimen with powerful shoulders, a small head, and a very wide neck that gave him the air of a bull-made-man or some inanimate rock formation. “There was thirty-one and a half of ’em, eh?”
“I’m not one of ‘them.’ I’m their captive,” Maya said haughtily. “I’m a royal scribe and secretary to the Master of the King’s Stable, Lord Hani.”
The man’s red grin widened in the midst of his dark beard. “So, they took ’emselves a captive did they? I guess you was easy enough to carry.”
Maya tried not to let his desperation show. “If you take me back to the high commissioner in Azzati, they’ll give you a reward.”
“Tempted, but I’m not sure the high commissioner would give us a very warm welcome. You might say we’re brigands. Or at least, that’s the way he’ll see it.”
Maya was confused. Had one group of hapiru attacked another, or were these simply highwaymen? “I’m sure Lord Hani would give you a very large reward,” he cajoled, trying not to think of what might become of him if they didn’t take him back.
“What’s your name, little man?”
“Amen-mes known as Maya son of... Turo.” To his horror, he found himself struggling to remember his own father’s name.
“And I’m Shum-addi—son of a jackal.” Shum-addi gave Maya a jolly wink. “Welcome to the army of our little kingdom in the makin’.” The hapir gestured around at the camp with a meaty hand. Shum-addi had very red lips that cleft his face in a grin like a wound. His eyes, which were uneven in size, were evaluating as he looked Maya up and down. “Your master’s a emissary of the king of the Two Lands, ain’t he?”