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

by Wilbur Smith

  She tried to rise when I stroked her neck, but she was too weak. She fell back, and her breath gurgled and wheezed in her throat. The thick, creamy pus bubbled out of her nostrils, and I could hear that she was drowning in it. Her throat was closing, so that she had to battle for each breath.

  She was watching me with an almost human expression of trust and appeal. I was overcome with a sense of helplessness. This affliction was beyond my previous experience. I slipped the snowy-white linen shawl from my shoulder and used it to mop the streaming pus from her nostrils. It was a pathetically inadequate attempt, for as fast as I wiped it away, fresh trickles of the stinking stuff poured from her.

  ‘Taita!’ Hui called to me. ‘Every one of our animals has been stricken by this pestilence.’ Grateful for the distraction, I left Patience and went through the rest of the herd. Half of them were down already, and those still upright were mostly staggering or beginning to drool the thick yellow pus from their mouths.

  ‘What must we do?’ Hui and all the charioteers appealed to me. I was burdened with their trust. They expected me alone to avert this terrible disaster, and I knew that it was beyond my powers. I knew of no remedy, and could not think of even the most drastic and unlikely treatment.

  I stumbled back to where Patience lay, and wiped away the latest flood of stinking discharge from her muzzle. I could see that she was sinking away swiftly. Each breath she drew now was a terrible struggle. My grief weakened me, and I knew that in my helplessness I would soon melt into tears and be of no further use to any of them, neither horses nor men.

  Somebody knelt beside me, and I looked up to see that it was one of the Shilluk grooms, a willing and likely fellow whom I had befriended and who now looked upon me as his master. ‘It is the sickness of the gnu,’ he told me in his simple language. ‘Many will die.’

  I stared at him, as what he said began to make sense in my muddled mind. I remembered the snorting, drooling herds of slate-coloured animals darkening the plains with their numbers, and how we had thought it a gift of the benevolent gods.

  ‘This sickness kills our cattle when the gnu come. Those that live through it are safe. They are never sick again.’

  ‘What can we do to save them, Habani?’ I demanded, but he shook his head.

  ‘There is nothing to be done.’

  I was holding Patience’s head in my arms when she died. The breath choked away in her throat and she shuddered and her legs stiffened and then relaxed. I let out a low moan of grief and was on the very edge of the abyss of despair, when I looked up and through my tears saw that Patience’s colt was down, with the yellow slime bubbling up from his throat.

  In that moment my despair was replaced with a burning anger. ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘I will not let you die also.’

  I ran to the foal’s side and shouted to Habani to bring leather buckets of hot water. With a linen cloth I bathed the colt’s throat in an attempt to reduce the swelling, but it had no effect. The pus still poured from his nostrils, and the hot skin of his neck stretched out as the flesh ballooned like a bladder filling with air.

  ‘He is dying.’ Habani shook his head. ‘Many will die.’

  ‘I will not let it happen,’ I swore grimly, and sent Hui to the galley to fetch my medicine chest.

  By the time he returned, it was almost too late. The colt was in extremis. His breath was choking out of him and I could feel his strength draining away under my frantic hands. I felt for the ridged rings of his windpipe at the juncture of his throat and his chest. With one shallow cut through the skin I exposed the white sinewy pipe, and then I pressed the point of my scalpel into it and pierced the tough sheath. Immediately air hissed through the aperture and I saw the colt’s chest swell as his lungs inflated. He began to breathe again to a steady and even rhythm, but I saw almost immediately that the puncture-wound in his throat was closing again with blood and mucus.

  In frantic haste I hacked a length of bamboo from the framework of the nearest chariot, and I cut a hollow tube from the end of it and pushed this into the wound. The bamboo tube held the wound open and the colt relaxed his struggles as the air sucked and blew unimpeded through it.

  ‘Hui!’ I yelled for him. ‘I will show you how to save them.’

  Before night fell, I had trained a hundred or more of the charioteers and grooms to perform this crude but effective surgery, and we worked on through the night by the wavering, uncertain light of the oil lamps.

  There were over thirteen thousand horses in the royal herds by this time. We could not save them all, although we tried. We worked on, with the blood from the severed throats caking black up to our elbows. When exhaustion overcame us, we fell on a bale of hay and slept for an hour and then staggered up and went back to work.

  Some of the horses were not as badly affected by this pestilence, which I had named the Yellow Strangler. They seemed to have an in-born resistance to its ravages. The discharge from their nostrils was no more copious than I had seen in the gnu herds, and many of these remained on their feet and threw off the disease within days.

  Many others died before we were able to open the windpipe, and even some of those, on which we had successfully operated, died later from mortification and complication of the wound which we had inflicted. Of course, many of our horses were out on expeditions into the plains and beyond my help. Prince Memnon lost two out of every three of his steeds and had to abandon his chariots and return to the Qebui rivers on foot.

  In the end we lost over half our horses, seven thousand dead, and those that survived were so weakened and cast down that it was many months before they were strong and fit enough to pull a chariot. Patience’s colt survived and replaced his old dam in my affections. He took the right-hand trace in my chariot, and was so strong and reliable that I called him Rock.

  ‘How has this pestilence affected our hopes of a swift return to Egypt?’ my mistress asked me.

  ‘It has set us back many years,’ I told her, and saw the pain in her eyes. ‘We lost most of our best-trained old horses, those like Patience. We will have to breed up the royal herds all over again, and train young horses to take their places in the traces of the chariots.’

  I waited for the annual migration of the gnu the following year with dread, but when it came and their multitudes once more darkened the plains, Habani was proved correct. Only a few of our horses developed the symptoms of the Yellow Strangler, and these in a mild form that set them back for only a few weeks before they were strong enough to work again.

  What struck me as strange was that the foals born in the period after the first infection of the Yellow Strangler, those who had never been exposed to the actual disease, were as immune as their dams who had contracted a full dose. It was as though the immunity had been transferred to them in the milk that they sucked from their mother’s udder. I was certain that we would never again have to experience the full force of the plague.

  * * *

  My Major duty now, laid upon me by my mistress, was the construction of Pharaoh’s tomb in the mountains. I was obliged to spend much of my time in that wild and forbidding place, and I became fascinated by those mountains and all their moods.

  Like a beautiful woman, the mountains were unpredictable, sometimes remote and hidden in dense moving veils of clouds that were shot through with lightning and riven with thunder. At other times they were lovely and seductive, beckoning to me, challenging me to discover all their secrets and experience all their dangerous delights.

  Although I had eight thousand slaves to prosecute the task, and the unstinted assistance of all our finest craftsmen and artists, the work on the tomb went slowly. I knew it would take many years to complete the elaborate mausoleum which my mistress insisted we must build, and to decorate it in a fashion fit for the Lord of the Two Kingdoms. In truth there was no point in hurrying the work, for it would take as long to rebuild the royal horse herds and train the Shilluk infantry regiments until they were a match for the Hyksos squadrons against which
they would one day be matched.

  When I was not up in the mountains working at the tomb, I spent my time at Qebui, where there were myriad different tasks and pleasures awaiting me. These ranged from the education of my two little princesses to devising new military tactics with Lord Tanus and the prince.

  By this time it was clear that, whereas Memnon would one day command all the chariot divisions, Tanus had never outgrown his first distrust of the horse. He was a sailor and an infantryman to the bone, and as he grew older, he was ever more conservative and traditional in his use of his new Shilluk regiments.

  The prince was growing into a dashing and innovative charioteer. Each day he came to me with a dozen new ideas, some of them farfetched, but others quite brilliant. We tried them all, even the ones that I knew were impossible. He was sixteen years old when Queen Lostris promoted him to the rank of Best of Ten Thousand.

  Now that Tanus rode with me so seldom, I slowly took over the role of Memnon’s principal driver. We developed a rapport which became almost instinctive, and which extended to our favourite team of horses, Rock and Chain. When we were on the march, Memnon still liked to drive, and I stood on the footplate behind him. However, as soon as we engaged in action, he would toss me the reins and seize his bow or his javelins from the rack. I would take the chariot into the fray and steer it through the evolutions we had dreamed up together.

  As Memnon matured and his strength increased, we began to win some of the prizes at the games and the military tattoos that were a feature of our lives at Qebui. First, we triumphed in the flat races where our team of Rock and Chain could display its paces to the full; then we began to win the shooting and javelin contests. Soon we were known as the chariot that had to be beaten before anyone could claim the champion’s ribbon from Queen Lostris.

  I remember the cheers as our chariot flew through the final gate of the course, myself at the traces and Memnon on the footplate hurling a javelin right and left into the two straw-filled dummies as we passed, then the mad dash down the straight, with the prince howling like a demon and the long wind-blown plait of his hair standing out behind his head, like the tail of a charging lion.

  Soon there were other encounters in which the prince began to distinguish himself, and those without any assistance from me. Whenever he strode past the young girls, with the Gold of Valour gleaming on his chest and the champion’s ribbon knotted into his plait, they giggled and blushed and slanted their eyes in his direction. Once I entered his tent in haste with some important news for him, only to come up short as I found my prince well mounted and oblivious to all but the tender young body and the pretty face beneath him. I withdrew silently, a little saddened that the age of his innocence was past.

  Of all these pleasures, none for me could compare with those precious hours that I was still able to spend with my mistress. In this her thirty-third year she was in the very high summer of her beauty. Her allure was enhanced by her sophistication and her poise. She had become a queen indeed, and a woman without peer.

  All her people loved her, but none of them as much as I did. Not even Tanus was able to surpass me in my devotion to her. It was my pride that she still needed me so much, and relied upon me and my judgement and my advice so trustingly. Notwithstanding the other blessings that I had to adorn my existence, she would ever be the one great love of my life.

  * * *

  I should have been contented and replete, but there is a restlessness in my nature that was exacerbated by this new wanderlust that had come to plague me. Whenever I paused from my labours at Pharaoh’s tomb, and looked up at them, the mountains beckoned me. I began to make short excursions into their lonely gorges, often alone but sometimes with Hui or some other companion.

  Hui was with me when I first saw the herds of wild ibex high above us in the lofty crags of the mountain. They were of a species we had never seen before. They stood twice as tall as the wild goats that we knew from the Nile valley, and some of the old billy-goats carried such a mass of curling horn that they seemed as monstrous as some fabulous beast.

  It was Hui who carried reports of these huge ibex back to the twin rivers where the fleet lay at Qebui, and within the month, Lord Tanus arrived at the valley of the king’s tomb, with his bow over his shoulder and Prince Memnon at his side. The prince was fast becoming as ardent a huntsman as his father, and was every bit as eager for the chase. As for myself, I welcomed the chance to explore those fascinating highlands in such company.

  We had meant to venture only as far as the first line of peaks, but when we climbed to their crest, we were presented with a vista that was breathtaking. We saw other mountains against the sky that were shaped like flat-topped anvils, and were the tawny colour of lions. They dwarfed the peaks on which we stood and lured us onwards.

  The Nile climbed in concert with us up through precipitous valleys and dark gorges that churned its waters to gleaming white. We could not always follow its course, but in places were forced to climb above it and follow giddy goat-tracks across the face of a frowning mountain.

  Then, when we had been lured deep into its maw, the mountain loosed its full fury upon us.

  We were one hundred men in our company, with ten pack-horses to carry our provisions. We were camped in the depths of one of these fathomless gorges, with the fresh trophies of Tanus’ and Memnon’s latest hunt laid out upon the rocky floor for our appraisal and admiration. These were two goat’s heads, the largest we had seen in all our travels, so heavy in horn that it took two slaves to lift one of them. Suddenly it began to rain.

  In our Egyptian valley it may rain once in twenty years. None of us had ever imagined anything even remotely like the rain that fell upon us now.

  First, dense black clouds roofed over the narrow strip of sky that showed between the cliffs that walled us in, so that we were plunged from sunny noon into deep twilight. A cold wind raced down the valley and chilled our bodies and our spirits. We huddled together in dismay.

  Then lightning lanced from the sombre belly of the clouds and shattered the rocks around us, filling the air with the smell of sulphur and sparks struck from flint. Thunder burst upon us, magnified as it rolled from cliff to cliff, and the earth jumped and trembled beneath our feet.

  Then the rain fell. It did not come down upon us in the form of drops. It was as though we stood under one of the cataracts of the Nile when the river was in full flood. There was no longer air to breathe, water filled our mouths and our nostrils so that we felt that we were drowning. The rain was so thick that we could see only the blurred outline of the man who stood an arm’s-length away. It battered us so that we were thrown down and cringed beneath the nearest rock for shelter. Still it assaulted all the senses and stung our exposed skin like a swarm of angry hornets.

  It was cold. I had never known such cold, and we were covered only with our thin linen shawls. The cold sucked the force out of my limbs, and we shivered until our teeth clattered together in our mouths, and we could not still them even though we bit down with all the strength of our jaws.

  Then, above the sound of the falling rain, I heard a new sound. It was the sound of water which had become a ravening monster. Down the narrow valley where we lay swept a wall of grey water. It stretched from cliff to cliff, and carried everything before it.

  I was caught up in it and tumbled end over end. I felt life being beaten out of me as I was thrown against the rocks, and icy water filled my throat. Darkness overwhelmed me, and I thought that I was dead.

  I have a vague recollection of hands dragging me from the flood, and then I was wafted away to some dark and distant shore. The voice of my prince called me back. Before I could open my eyes I smelled wood-smoke, and felt the warmth of the flames on one side of my body.

  ‘Tata, wake up! Speak to me.’ The voice was insistent, and I opened my eyes. Memnon’s face floated before me, and he smiled at me. Then he called over his shoulder, ‘He is awake, Lord Tanus.’

  I found that we were in a rock cav
e and that outside, the night had fallen. Tanus came across from the smoky fire of damp wood and squatted beside the prince.

  ‘How are you, old friend? I don’t think you have broken any bones.’

  I struggled into a sitting position, and gingerly tested every part of my body before I replied, ‘My head is cracked through, and every limb aches. Apart from that, I am cold and hungry.’

  ‘You will live then,’ Tanus chuckled, ‘though a while ago I doubted any of us would. We have to get out of these cursed mountains before something worse happens. It was madness ever to venture into a place where the rivers come out of the sky.’

  ‘What about the others?’ I asked.

  Tanus shook his head. ‘They are all drowned. You were the only one that we were able to drag from the flood.’

  ‘What about the horses?’

  ‘Gone,’ he grunted. ‘All gone.’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Tanus replied. ‘Even my bow is lost in the river. I have only the sword at my side and the clothes on my body.’

  * * *

  At dawn we left our Rock Shelter and started back down that treacherous valley. At the foot of the gorge we found the bodies of some of our men and the horses strewn upon the rocks where they had been stranded when the flood receded.

  We scavenged amongst the rocks and scree, and we managed to recover some of our stores and equipment. To my great joy I found my medicine chest still intact, though flooded with water. I laid out the contents on a rock, and while they dried, I fashioned a sling from a leather harness to carry the chest upon my back.

  In the meantime, Memnon had cut strips of meat from the carcass of one of the horses and grilled them over another fire of driftwood. When we had eaten our fill, we saved the rest of the meat, and set out on the return.

  The journey slowly descended into nightmare as we scaled steep rocky slopes and dropped into the gorges beyond. There seemed to be no end to this terrible wilderness, and our bruised feet in open sandals protested each step. At night we shivered miserably around a smoky little fire of driftwood.