River God: A Novel of Ancient Egypt (Novels of Ancient Egypt)

by Wilbur Smith

  There was an instant outcry. Hyksos voices shouted orders, and weapons rattled in their scabbards. Then heavy footfalls pounded upon the stone staircase as a party of the enemy came dashing up on to the causeway.

  Their tall helmets appeared above the stone balustrade just ahead of us, and then the rest of them came into view. There were five of them in a body and they rushed up at us with drawn swords, big men with fish-scale shirts of mail and brightly coloured ribbons in their beards. But one of them was taller than the rest. I did not recognize him at first, for he had grown a beard and decorated it with ribbons in the Hyksos fashion, and the visor of his helmet hid half his face. Then he shouted in that voice that I would never forget, ‘So it’s you, young Harrab! I killed the old dog, and now I will kill his puppy!’

  I should have known that Lord Intef would be the very first of them to come sniffing like a hungry hyena after Pharaoh’s treasure. He must have raced ahead of the main Hyksos division to be the first into the funerary temple. Despite his boast, he did not rush to meet Tanus, but waved the band of Hyksos charioteers forward to do the job for him.

  Tanus swept Prince Memnon from his shoulders and tossed him to me as though he were a doll.

  ‘Run!’ he ordered. ‘I will buy you a little time here.’ He rushed the Hyksos while they were still bunched on the staircase and had no room to wield their swords. He killed the first one cleanly, with that thrust through the throat which he always performed so skilfully.

  ‘Don’t stand there gawking,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Run!’

  I was not gawking, but with the child clutched to my chest, I knew how futile was his command. Burdened as I was, I would never reach the river-bank.

  I stepped to the parapet of the causeway and glanced over. There were two Hyksos chariots parked directly below me, with the horses blowing and stamping in the traces. Only one man had been left to hold them, while his companions rushed up the staircase. He stood at the heads of the two teams and his whole attention was fixed on his charges. He had not seen me on the causeway above his head.

  Still clutching Memnon, I threw my legs over the parapet and pushed myself outwards. The prince shrieked with alarm as we dropped. From the top of the causeway to where the Hyksos charioteer stood was four times the height of a tall man. I might easily have broken a leg in the fall, except that I landed neatly on the unsuspecting Hyksos’s head. The impact broke his neck; clearly I heard the vertebrae snap, and he crumpled under us, breaking our fall.

  I scrambled to my feet, with Memnon howling in outrage at this rough treatment, but there was more of it to follow. I dropped him into the cockpit of the nearest chariot and looked up at my mistress. She was peeping over the parapet high above me.

  ‘Jump!’ I shouted. ‘I will catch you!’ She never even hesitated, but flung herself over the edge so promptly that I was not yet braced to receive her. She came hurtling down on top of me, with her short skirts blowing up and exposing those long sleek thighs. She hit me squarely and knocked the wind out of my lungs. We went down together in a heap.

  I scrambled up wheezing for breath, and dragged her to her feet. I shoved her roughly over the footplate of the chariot and shouted at her, ‘See to Memnon!’ She grabbed him just as he tried to escape from the cockpit of the chariot. He was still howling with anger and fright. I had to scramble over the top of them to reach the reins and take control of the horses.

  ‘Hang on tight!’ The pair of horses responded instantly to my hands, and I wheeled the whole rig smartly under the wall. One wheel bounced over the body of the man that I had killed with my fall.

  ‘Tanus!’ I screamed. ‘This way!’

  High above us he jumped up on to the parapet, and balanced there easily, exchanging parry and thrust with the group of charioteers who bayed around him, like hounds around a treed leopard.

  ‘Jump, Tanus, jump!’ I yelled, and he stepped out over the edge of the stone wall and let himself drop. With his cloak billowing around his head and shoulders, he landed astride the back of the off-side horse. His sword jerked out of his hand and clattered on the hard earth, and Tanus threw both arms around the animal’s neck.

  ‘Hi up!’ I called to the pair, and whipped the end of the reins around their hindquarters. They surged forward into a full gallop. I steered them across the pathway and into the open fields that led down to the river-bank. I could see the sails of our fleet out there in midstream, and I could even recognize the pennant of the Breath of Horus flying amongst the forest of masts. We had half a mile to go to reach the bank, and I glanced over my shoulder.

  Lord Intef and his men had rushed down the staircase. Even as I watched, they were climbing up into the other chariot. I cursed myself that I had not disabled it. It would have taken only a moment to cut the traces and chase away the horses, but I had been in a panic to get my mistress and the prince away.

  Now Lord Intef was coming after us. His chariot had not covered a hundred paces before I realized that it was faster than the one I was driving. Tanus’ weight on the back of the off-side horse was hampering its gallop; he was a heavy man and he still clung to its neck with both arms. He seemed frozen with terror. I think that this was the first time that I had ever seen him truly afraid. I have seen him stand firm and shoot down a charging lion with his bow, but the horse terrified him.

  I tried to ignore the following chariot, and I looked ahead and concentrated all my newly acquired skill on piloting us over the open cultivated fields and through the maze of irrigation canals and ditches to the bank of the Nile. The Hyksos chariot was heavy and unwieldy, compared to my Taita vehicle. The solid wooden wheels with their glinting and turning knives around the rims bit deeply into the clay loam of the ploughed lands, and all that bronze armour and ornamentation on the dashboard and side-frames weighed us down. The horses must have been driven hard before I took control of them. They were lathered with sweat and white froth dripped from their muzzles.

  We had not covered half the distance to the river-bank when I heard the shouts of the Hyksos charioteer closing with us, and the pounding of hooves. I glanced back to see them not three lengths behind. The driver was lashing the horses with a whip of knotted leather tails and yelling at them in that coarse and ugly language. Beside him, Lord Intef was leaning out eagerly over the dashboard. His ribboned beard was streaming back on either side of his jaw, and his handsome features were lit by the rapture of the hunter.

  He shouted at me, and his voice carried over the sounds of the two labouring teams of horses. ‘Taita, my old darling, do you still love me? I want you to prove it once more before you die.’ And he laughed. ‘You are going to kneel in front of me and die with your mouth full.’ My skin prickled with insects’ feet of horror at the image his words conjured up.

  There was an irrigation ditch ahead of us, and I swerved to run alongside it, for the sides were deep and sheer. The Hyksos chariot followed us round, gaining on us with every stride.

  ‘And you, my lovely daughter, I will give you to the Hyksos soldiers to play with. They will teach you a few tricks that Harrab forgot to show you. I don’t need you, now that I have your brat.’ Queen Lostris clutched the prince closer to her chest and her face was pale and set.

  I understood Lord Intef’s design immediately. A child of the royal blood of Egypt, even as a satrap of the Hyksos, would command the loyalty of all our people. Prince Memnon was the puppet through which King Salitis and Lord Intef intended to rule the two kingdoms. It was an ancient and effective device of the conqueror. I pushed my horses to their utmost, but they were tiring and slowing, and Lord Intef closed with us so swiftly that he no longer needed to shout to make himself heard.

  ‘Lord Harrab, this is a pleasure long delayed. What shall we do with you? I wonder. First, you and I will watch the soldiers entertain my daughter—’ I tried to stop my ears to his filth, but his voice was insidious.

  I was still gazing ahead, concentrating on the rough and dangerous ground, but from the corner
of my eye I saw the heads of the Hyksos pair draw level with our vehicle. Their manes flowed back, and their eyes were wild as they tore up beside us at full gallop.

  I looked back at them. The burly Hyksos archer on the footplate behind Intef nocked an arrow to his short recurved bow. The range was so short that even from the bouncing and leaping platform, he could not miss hitting one of us.

  Tanus was out of the fight. He had dropped his sword. He was still clinging to the neck of the horse on the side furthest from the overtaking chariot. I had only my little dagger, and Queen Lostris was down on her knees trying to shield the prince with her own body.

  It was only then that I realized the mistake that the Hyksos driver had made. He had pushed his team of horses into the gap between us and the deep irrigation ditch. He had left himself no room to manoeuvre.

  The archer lifted his bow and drew the fletchings of the arrow to his lips. He aimed at me. I was looking into his eyes over the barbed flint of the arrow-head. His brows were black and dense and bushy, his eyes as dark and implacable as those of a lizard. The Hyksos horses were running level with the hub of my near-side wheel, and I gathered my reins and swerved towards them. The flashing bronze knives that stood out of my wheel-rims buzzed softly as they spun towards the legs of the horses.

  The Hyksos driver shouted with consternation as he realized his error. His horses were trapped between the ditch and those cruel knives. The blades were less than a hand-span from the knees of the big bay stallion running nearest to me.

  At that same instant, the Hyksos archer loosed his arrow, but my sudden swerve had beaten him also. The arrow seemed to fly quite slowly towards my head, but this was an illusion produced by my terror. In reality it flashed like a beam of sunlight over my shoulder, the flint edge touched my ear, and a drop of blood dripped from the grazed skin on to my chest.

  The other driver had tried to counter my swerve by turning away from me, but now his far wheel was running along the lip of the irrigation ditch. It was crumbling away beneath the bronze-bound rim, and the chariot lurched and teetered on the edge.

  I gathered my horses and swung them again, turning into the other chariot. My wheel-blades hacked into the legs of the nearest horse, and the poor beast squealed with agony. I saw pieces of skin and hair fly into the air above the sideboard of my chariot, and I steeled myself to the whinnying cry of the horse, and turned hard into him again. This time blood and bone chips flew in a mush from the broken legs, and the horse went down, kicking and squealing, pulling his team-mate down with him. The Hyksos chariot went over the edge of the ditch. I saw the two passengers in the cockpit thrown clear, but the driver was carried over and crushed beneath the capsized truck and the heavy, spinning wheels.

  Our own chariot was now tearing along dangerously close to the edge of the ditch, but I managed to gather the horses and bring them back in hand.

  ‘Whoa!’ I slowed them, and turned to look back. A cloud of dust hung over the ditch where the Hyksos chariot had disappeared. I brought my team down to a trot. The riverbank was two hundred paces ahead, and nothing stood in our way to safety.

  I turned for one last look behind me. The Hyksos archer, who had fired his arrow at me, lay in a crumpled and broken heap where he had been thrown. Lord Intef lay a little further from the edge of the ditch. I truly believe I might have left him there if he had not stirred, but at that moment he sat up and then pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.

  Suddenly all my hatred of him came back to me with such force and clarity that my mind seethed with it. It was as though a vein had burst behind my eyes, for my vision darkened, and was glazed over with the reddish sheen of blood. A savage, incoherent cry burst from my throat, and I wheeled the horses in a tight circle until we were headed back towards the causeway.

  Lord Intef stood directly in my path. He had lost his helmet and his weapons in the fall, and he seemed half-dazed, for he swayed upon his feet. I whipped the horses up into a gallop once more, and the heavy wheels rumbled forward. I aimed the chariot directly at him. His beard was dishevelled and the ribbons in it sullied with dust. His eyes also were dull and bemused, but as I drove the horses down on him, suddenly they cleared and his head came up.

  ‘No!’ he shouted, and began to back away, throwing out his hands towards me as if to fend off the massive carriage and the running horses. I aimed directly for him, but at the last moment, his dark gods defended him one last time. As I was right upon him, he threw himself to one side. I had seen him staggering and I had supposed that he was weak and helpless. Instead, he was quick and nimble as a jackal pursued by the hounds. The chariot was heavy and unwieldy, and I could not turn it swiftly enough to follow his side-step and dodge.

  I missed him and went on by. I wrestled with the reins, but the horses carried me on a hundred paces before I could get them under control and swing the heavy vehicle round again. By the time we came around, Intef was running for the shelter of the ditch. If he reached it, he would be safe—I realized that. I swore bitterly as I drove the team after him.

  It was then that his gods finally abandoned him. He had almost reached the ditch, but he was looking back over his shoulder at me, and he was not watching his footing. He ran into a patch of clay clods, hard as rocks, and his ankle turned under him. He fell heavily but rolled back on to his feet like an acrobat. He tried to run again, but the pain in his broken ankle brought him up. He hobbled a pace or two and then tried to hop forward towards the ditch on one leg.

  ‘You are mine at last!’ I screamed at him, and he spun around to face me, balanced on one leg as I drove the chariot down on him. His face was pale, but those leopard eyes blazed up at me with all the bitterness and hatred of his cruel and twisted soul.

  ‘He is my father!’ my mistress cried at my side, holding the prince’s face to her bosom so that he would not see it. ‘Leave him, Taita. He is of my blood.’

  I had never disobeyed her in my life, this was the first time. I made no move to check the horses, but gazed into Lord Intef’s eyes, for once without fear.

  At the very end, he almost cheated me again. He flung himself sideways, and such were his agility and his strength that he twisted himself clear of the truck and the wheels of the chariot, but he could not quite avoid the wheel-knives. One of the spinning blades hooked in the fish-scale links of his coat of mail. The point of the knife tore through the armour and hooked in the flesh of his belly. The knife was spinning and his entrails snagged and wrapped around it, so that his guts were drawn out of him, as though he was one of those big blue perch from the river being disembowelled by a fishwife on the market block.

  He was towed along behind us by the slippery ropes of his own entrails, but he fell slowly behind as more coils and tangles of his gut were torn from his open stomach cavity. He clutched at them with both hands, as they were stripped out of him, but they slid through his fingers like some grotesque umbilical cord that bound him to the turning wheel of the chariot.

  His screams were a sound that I wish never to hear again as long as I live. The echoes of them still sometimes haunt my nightmares, so that in the end he inflicted his last cruelty upon me. I have never been able to forget him, as I would so dearly have wished.

  When at last the gruesome rope by which he was being dragged across the black earth snapped, he was left lying in the centre of the field. At last those cries of his were stilled, and he lay without movement.

  I pulled up the horses and Tanus slid down off the back of his mount and came back to the chariot. He lifted my mistress and the prince down and held them close to his chest. My mistress was weeping.

  ‘Oh, it was so terrible! Whatever he did to us, he was still my father.’

  ‘It’s all right now,’ Tanus hugged her. ‘It’s all over now.’

  Prince Memnon was peering back over his mother’s shoulder at the sprawling figure of his grandfather with all the fascination that children have with the macabre. Suddenly he piped up in that ringing treble, ‘He was a nast
y man.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed softly, ‘he was a very nasty man.’

  ‘Is the nasty man dead now?’

  ‘Yes, Mem, he is dead. Now we can all sleep better at nights.’

  I had to drive the horses hard along the river-bank to catch up with our departing flotilla, but at last I drew level with Kratas’ galley, and he recognized us in the unfamiliar vehicle. Even across that wide stretch of water, his astonishment was apparent. Later he told me that he had believed we were safely aboard one of the leading ships of the flotilla.

  I turned the horses loose before I left the chariot. Then we waded out into the water to reach the small boat which Kratas sent in to pick us up.

  * * *

  The Hyksos would not let us go that easily. Day after day, their chariots pursued our flotilla down both banks of the Nile as we fled southwards.

  Whenever we looked back over the stern of the Breath of Horus, we saw the dust of the enemy columns following us. Very often the dust was mingled with the darker clouds of smoke that rose from the towns and villages on the river-banks which the Hyksos burned as they sacked them. As we passed each of the Egyptian towns, a flock of small craft sailed out to join our fleet, so that our armada increased in numbers with each day that passed.

  There were times, when the wind was unfavourable, that the columns of chariots overhauled us. Then we saw their cohorts gleaming on the banks on either side of us, and heard their harsh but futile jeers and challenges ring out across the water. However, eternal Mother Nile gave us her protection, as she had over the centuries, and they could not reach us out on the stream. Then the wind would veer back into the north and we drew ahead of them once more, and the dust-clouds fell back on to the northern horizon.

  ‘Their horses cannot keep up this chase much longer,’ I told Tanus on the morning of the twelfth day.

  ‘Don’t be too smug about it. Salitis has the lure of the treasure of Pharaoh Mamose and the legitimate heir to the double crown,’ Tanus replied simply. ‘Gold and power have a marvellous way of stiffening a man’s resolve. We have not seen the last of the barbarian yet.’