That was when I saw for the first time how fast camels could move. The ones I’d seen in Constantinople had shambled round the Circus with bundles of heavy swords heaped on their backs. Our own party had so far gone at a steady trot. These nomads, though, could get up the sort of speed you see in horses only at full pelt over level ground – and they were off the road and on stony ground. One moment, they were sitting watching us. The next, it seemed, they were a vanishing blur in the distance.
All that remained was the cloud of dust that drifted towards us, and that I breathed straight in. I nearly fell off the camel with my choking fit. I coughed. I sneezed. Tears ran down my face. I couldn’t breathe. If I’d breathed in freshly ground pepper, it wouldn’t have burned and paralysed so. And all around me, I heard the high-pitched giggling that passes, even with grown men, among the Eastern races for laughter.
‘Drink this,’ said Lucas, riding beside me. He raised his leather water sack and let a small trickle fall into my mouth. ‘Rinse and spit,’ he said curtly. The next trickle was a little more generous. It was becoming clear that water out here was not for quenching any but the most pressing thirst. I strained to remember the maps Hermogenes had shown me a few days before. Assume we were just north of Letopolis when Lucas had dropped his Imperial service act. Assume perhaps another twenty miles north, and now ten miles west. That would put us on the road to Siwa.
Most likely, we weren’t going all the way to Siwa, but were headed into an area that I knew was thick with tombs and temples put up during the Old Faith. Here seemed as good a place as any for a Brotherhood encampment. It would have to be pretty far out into the desert, though, if water was being this strictly rationed. We might be another day on this road. At some point, I realised, we’d be passing Soteropolis. It wouldn’t be quite the visit there I’d had in mind.
Chapter 20
We stopped once more in the late afternoon. I thought at first we were to pack up for the night. Martin looked ready to die again, and I was now hurting all over. But I soon realised this was just another pause in what was turning into an endless journey into the desert. We’d come to a mostly fallen-down building of mud brick. While his men squatted, all looking remarkably glum, Lucas stood on a little mound of stones and packed sand. He took in a deep breath and called something out in a rhythmical and even a somewhat liturgical chant. He called out once without any response. As he was going through the whole chant again, an old man shambled into sight. I think he’d been sleeping in a hole in the ground. He’d been asleep, I could be sure. He was blinking about in the now moderate light as if it had still been the high noon of the desert.
‘Some desert hermit,’ I told myself. Perhaps it was time for a blessing of the Brotherhood’s efforts in rounding me up for the completion of whatever it was Leontius had put in everyone’s mind regarding me. But, no. I looked harder at the old man. He was bald enough and shrivelled enough for someone who’d left the baths and company of civilisation behind so he could seek the Love of Jesus Christ. But the pattern on his tattered robe, and the hooped cross in his hand, told me this was one of the priests of the Old Faith.
I couldn’t follow the details of what passed next. But the outlines were clear. There was an offering from Lucas of flowers and dried fruit. In return, the old priest set up a long chant filled with references to Isis and Horus and Sekhmet and other divinities of the former national religion of Egypt – a religion now proscribed under penalties that made the wilder extremes of the Monophysite heresy by comparison a matter of petty theft.
Not surprisingly, since he’d called for the ceremony, Lucas took all the words and gestures in absolute earnest. He’d pulled some headgear from his saddlebag and put it on. It was too big for him, and the gilded snake that jutted out in front was continually overbalancing and pulling the whole thing down over his face. But, unaware of – or perhaps indifferent to – how ridiculous it all made him appear, he danced around and joined in the responses, a look on his face of demented exaltation.
His men took it very badly. They sat with their backs to him. One of them took out a rosary and counted its beads. Two of the others muttered to each other, every so often crossing themselves. The others sat in glum silence until the service was over. Without a word, they got us and themselves mounted again.
I managed to twist myself round once to look back. Though we’d covered about a mile, I could see the old priest, standing on the mound outside his temple. Still dancing in his arthritic way, he was now waving like a sailor sending messages to the shore.
‘Is not the desert beautiful?’ Lucas slimed at me as his men were packing up after another rest. It was now the very late afternoon, and he’d told me we were to travel through the night. I looked at the untidy bleakness that stretched all around.
‘It takes all sorts,’ I said morosely. ‘Any chance of untying me?’ I asked, holding up my bound wrists. ‘I doubt I’d get very far in this waste, even if I could break away on that thing.’ I nodded at the camel. ‘Besides, I’ve no doubt your men have better things to do than wipe my arse.’
‘But surely a man of My Lord’s high station cannot find such hospitality unwelcome?’ Lucas replied with another stab at sarcasm.
I grunted and went back to an inspection of the desert. Now the shadows were lengthening, its reds and browns had been joined by patches of black that gave the whole scene a thoroughly diseased look. No wonder all the monks who’d settled out here went barking mad in the end. Perhaps that was how the old priest had started, and ancestral recusancy was the form his own madness had taken.
‘The desert is, of course, part of Egyptian life,’ Lucas opened again. ‘It is the red lands that mark the boundaries within which our life has always gone on. For ten thousand years, we worked the black lands watered by the Nile. Except when invaders swept out of the desert, we lived in brotherhood and freedom. Always, the invaders were cleared out again. Always, the clearing out was followed by an age of glory. Do not the Holy Scriptures themselves record how once we ruled Syria as far as Jerusalem itself?’
‘Brotherhood and freedom?’ I snorted. ‘Nothing else in all the known world lends itself to tyranny and extortion so much as the Nile Valley. There’s a natural demand for officials to keep records of the flood and for surveyors to measure out the land afterwards. And with nowhere to run if these turn oppressive, it’s hardly surprising if the people become little more than two-legged farm animals.
‘Now, I don’t know any of your language,’ I went on, warming to my theme. ‘But there are histories of Egypt written in Greek. You can insist till you’re black in the face that they are all lies made up to justify foreign rule. But I’ve seen any number of those temple carvings and statues. They perfectly corroborate what I’ve read. You’re welcome to spout all you like about brotherhood and freedom. It only becomes true if you put meanings on words that would shock a theologian.’ I reached both hands up together to brush away some large fly that was flapping ineffectually about my face. Lucas gave me a thin smile. If he’d been expecting meek assent to the sermon he was trying to preach, he’d have to address himself to someone else.
‘You are mistaken,’ he said, lunacy back in his eyes. He put his face close to mine. For the first time, I noticed the smell of decaying teeth. The teeth I could see, though, were white and sharp. Unless the back ones had gone, he might be rotting away within from some disgusting cancer. It would have been nice to speculate whether this had begun to hurt yet. But Lucas gave me no time.
‘You are mistaken,’ he repeated, now emphatic. ‘The loyalty of the people to their Pharaoh was always freely given. How else could we have endured in peace and plenty for ten thousand years? How else could we have developed all science and all mathematics that the Greeks then stole from us?’
I laughed outright. Oh, he could have reached forward and struck me. But that would have broken the mood of triumphant dignity he was trying to impose. And if I was eventually to be done away with in some grotesque way, oili
ng him up wouldn’t make that any better. But pissing him off might be both enjoyable and useful.
‘Freely given?’ I sneered. ‘Ten thousand years? I’ll tell you this, my lad: Phocas himself never put up images of himself standing three times the height of his nobles, nor the nobles three times the height of the poor bloody people who worked to make their lives easy. All government, in every time and place, rests on fraud and force – the force of soldiers and officials hired by the rulers, and the fraud of the priests who assure everyone that the force is just. You’ll need to work much harder to convince me you didn’t have ten thousand years of that, before you had a thousand of the same from the Greeks.
‘As for what you dare call science and mathematics, you had nothing beyond the crude ingenuity to build those pyramids and all the other ugly things that haven’t yet fallen down – and to build them with slave labour. Before the Greeks showed up, you were as ignorant as any other barbarian race of mathematics as an abstract science able to explain all of nature. Your cosmology involves a flat earth with some naked goddess stretching over it as the sky. Your history is of kings ten feet tall and reigning for a hundred years. The glory you speak of is just more of the usual plunder mixed with bloody murder.
‘And, let’s face it, my poor, dear Lucas, you can no more read the picture writing of this literature than I can. All you have to read in the alphabetic writing your people learned from the Greeks is a mass of third-rate polemic against the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. What little they know about your brand of heresy makes you an embarrassment to the Monophysites of Syria. You’ve already acknowledged the debt you owe for alphabetic writing. Well, just accept that you owe the Greeks everything else in your culture that isn’t actually a joke.’ I paused to draw breath. I didn’t bother swivelling my eyes: I could feel Martin’s look of horrified despair. But I was enjoying myself, and I did have a more constructive purpose.
‘It has never, I’m sure,’ I went on, ‘crossed your tiny minds that there is in human affairs, as in the world around us, a natural order in which your kings and their priests – of whatever faith – have no place.’
His mouth was working. But Lucas had no words to throw at me. So I let my own roll straight forward over him.
‘Let us imagine a state of nature,’ I said, ‘that is, a world in which all are at “perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man”.’ I was quoting here verbatim from Epicurus – his Second Letter to Scatodotes of Cyrene. ‘This being given, let us suppose that everyone uses his freedom to supply himself with all his needs. Some he will abstract directly from the earth, which is common to all. Others he will acquire by free exchange with others. Therefore, some will raise crops. Others will take materials from the ground. Others will refine these things into other products. All property in this state of natural freedom will be based on the efforts of the possessor.
‘Men may gather together to appoint judges for those disputes that cannot be resolved by good will or by individual force of arms. They may further appoint generals for the defence of the whole community. But they’ll never voluntarily establish the system described in the Greek histories of your country or shown on your monuments.’ Well, that wasn’t direct quotation from the Great Man, though it was fair summary. I could have gone on to my own belief about the limitless improvement that might result from free exchange and the steady use of reason to understand the world about us. But it didn’t serve my purpose, this being more attack than exposition.
‘Don’t waste more of your hot air on how all this is for the people of Egypt,’ I said, my voice rising to a shrill scorn that could be noted if not followed by his men. ‘If that poor bugger you tore apart on the boat is any guide, I know exactly what you think about the people. I’ve heard that your sort refer to Greek rule as a cup of abominations. That may be a fair description. Perhaps the Greeks haven’t followed through in their actions the ideas they gave the world. But, let’s be honest, you don’t want to dash that cup to the ground. What you really want is to transfer it from Greek hands to your own with as little spillage along the way as can be managed.’
‘You lie! You’re worse than the Greeks you love. You lie! You lie!’ Lucas was on his feet, shouting now like a maniac. Two of his men were openly laughing at him. They couldn’t understand what we’d said – but they probably knew that the loser of an argument is the one who starts shouting first. Martin, I had no doubt, was praying the earth would cut out the middleman and swallow him up without pain. I smiled up happily, waiting for the spasm of rage to pass.
‘You lie!’ Lucas snarled as he brought his voice under control. ‘When I – the second, and the greater Meriamen Usermaatre Setepenre – put on the double crown of Egypt and—’
‘Oh, so that’s your plan, is it, Lucas?’ I cut in, still smiling happily. I’d got him at last. ‘Cupbearer won’t be good enough for you in this new order of things. You want the cup carried straight to your own lips. Well, I wonder if the Elders of your Brotherhood know about that?’
He was silent now, though breathing very heavily and fighting to keep control. I leaned over to one side and looked round him.
‘If it pleases Your Majesty,’ I said, with another look up at his sweating, hate-contorted face, ‘two of your subjects are coming to blows over who gets first use of the shit shovel. Why don’t you go and offer yourself as judge in their dispute. I can’t pronounce the stupid wog name you’ve given yourself. But you come back other than covered in their shit, and I’ll hail you as King Arsehole the First, the New and greater Solomon.
‘And so my faith is that of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour,’ I said loudly as a couple of his men came closer to try to follow what we’d been arguing about. ‘Mine is the faith that was born in Bethlehem and made glorious in Jerusalem.’ I carried on, throwing in as many names and places as seemed relevant. ‘And I utterly abjure the Satanic names of Isis, Horus, Sekhmet and all the other demons from Hell.’
Lucas stared at me as if I were the one who’d lost his wits. But his men looked on thoughtfully.
Chapter 21
‘Aelric, have you gone mad?’ Martin wailed softly once we were alone. ‘Are you trying to get us killed?’
‘Shut up!’ I hissed. ‘And do try to keep a stiff upper lip in front of these wogs.’ I ignored his jabbering reply and kicked him hard on the shin. ‘Look, Martin, they’ve got us trussed up like slaves brought to market. Only one of them understands any language that we know, and he’s mad. Meek obedience will get us nowhere. Pleading for mercy won’t work either. We’re already God knows where. Tomorrow, we’ll be God knows where else and with more of these people, facing God knows what. It’s obvious the people who are taking us there are under orders that involve keeping us in one piece. The people there may have other ideas. This being so, we have no option but to provoke a chance that doesn’t seem likely to present itself.
‘Lucas is plainly part of the Brotherhood that sticks to the Old Faith. His men are Christians. It may not get us anywhere. But working on that flaw within the Brotherhood structure is all we can do.’
I could see Martin was crying as we were tied back on our camels, and it wasn’t his piles that had brought this on. And except he was now screaming at his men rather more than he had, Lucas was still taking no risk with us.
The wind came up as the very late afternoon shaded into evening. For some time, I’d been aware of the deepening haze that moderated the sun. It deepened progressively, until the sun became a patch of dim red just above the horizon, and the little hills about us a blur. The chain of mountains that had lowered all afternoon in the far distance were now gone from sight. All around us, as if the land itself were crying out, there was a low moan of wind brushing on rocks.
As the first gusts began to stir up the dust into swirling clouds, I heard Lucas giving orders, a not
e in his voice of anger, though also of concern. Someone grunted back at him. I heard the sound of spitting. Further back, two men were beginning an argument. Someone reached from behind me to wind a sheet of cloth over my lower face. Then he prodded more life into my camel, and I had to lean hurriedly forward to avoid falling off.
Except it was dry and there was no thunder and lightning, it was just like a storm at sea. The winds howled around us with a terrible noise. Great clouds of dust were now whipped up to blot out the late remainder of the sun. The camel continued stolidly forward, but its head was down and it made little of its earlier speed. Ahead of me, men were shouting. It was the angry shouting of an argument that neither side wanted to concede.
Another while of this, and then we stopped. I felt arms reach up to pull me from the camel. I hit the impacted surface of the road with a heavy bump. I opened my eyes just a little. They were stinging from dust that had mixed like some caustic cement with the tears.
‘Get down there,’ Lucas shouted above the howling. He motioned at the outline of some rocks that were the nearest approach we’d find to shelter. ‘Put your cloak over you and keep your face down. Try anything funny, and I’ll kill your secretary.’
I did as I was told. The storm was now at its height. Keeping that cloak even over my mouth was as much as I could do. It was as much as I needed to do. Over my legs and trunk, I could feel the cold softness of the dust – or, after all, I should perhaps call it sand. Dust isn’t the right word for something that moves and settles like this stuff was doing. At first, it was a welcome softness. Then I began to worry about being buried alive. There was a whole army of Cambyses, I recalled, that had vanished in these deserts during a storm. After a thousand years, no one had come across the bones.
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