The Quest (Novels of Ancient Egypt)

by Wilbur Smith

  The oil in the lamps burnt low, the flames guttered and went out. The only light in the chamber came through the shaft high in the roof above. That light faded as the sun set behind the mountains, and left them in darkness to continue the battle. All through the night they were braced against each other in the hellish coupling, his manroot buried inside her, her muscles clamped on it remorselessly, no longer organs of procreation and pleasure but deadly weapons.

  When the dawn light seeped through the shaft in the roof, it found them still locked together. As the light strengthened, he could see into her eyes. In their depths he discerned the first flutter of panic, like the wings of a trapped bird beating against the bars of its cage. She tried to shutter them from him, but he held her eyes as she held his sex. Both were far past the borders of exhaustion. There was nothing left in either but the will to hold out. She had locked her long legs round his hips, and her arms round his back. He clasped her buttocks in one hand, pulling them on to him. His right hand, still clutching the Periapt of Lostris, was clenched at the small of her back. Very carefully, so that he did not alert her, he eased open the lid of the locket with his thumbnail and the chip of red stone fell into his palm.

  He pressed the stone against her spine, and felt it grow hot as it turned its power back on to her. She screamed, a long despairing wail, and struggled weakly, pumping her sex like bellows in a desperate effort to expel him. He timed his thrusts to her spasms. Each time she relaxed he drove in deeper. He reached the final barrier and, with one last mighty effort, pierced it.

  She collapsed under him, moaning and gibbering. He covered her mouth with his own and thrust his tongue down her throat, stifling her cries. He rampaged through the inner sanctum of her being, tearing open the coffers in which her knowledge and power were locked away and draining the contents. As he did so, his own strength flooded back, multiplied a hundredfold by what he took from her.

  He stared into her unspeakably lovely face, into those magnificent eyes, and saw them change. Her mouth gaped, drooling silver ropes of saliva. Her eyes turned opaque and dull as pebbles. Like a lump of wax held close to a flame, her nose broadened and coarsened. Her glowing skin faded to sallow yellow, became desiccated and as rough as the scaly hide of a reptile. It puckered into deep creases at the corners of her lips and eyes. The vibrant curls fell out of her hair, leaving it straight and flecked with dry skin from her scalp.

  Taita was still buried inside her, drawing in the torrent of astral and psychic substance that flowed from her, like the waters of a burst dam. There was such a vast quantity that the flood continued hour after hour. The ray of sunlight from the shaft in the ceiling had crept across the malachite tiles and reached the centre mark of noon before Taita felt the flow weaken and shrivel. At last it dried up completely. He had taken all there was. Eos was drained and empty.

  Taita allowed his manroot to deflate and slither out of her. He rolled off her and stood up. His sex was swollen, bruised and rubbed raw in places. He suppressed the pain and went to the silver jug of water on the table beside her couch. He drank deeply, then sat on the edge of her couch, watching her as she lay on the floor.

  She breathed harshly through her open mouth. Her eyes were fixed in a blind stare on the roof of the chamber as her body began to swell. Like a corpse left in the sun, her belly ballooned as though filling with the gases of decay. The slim arms and legs bloated. The flesh puffed, soft and shapeless as a bladder of butter. Taita watched as her flesh billowed until her limbs disappeared in the pasty white folds. Only her head remained, tiny in comparison with the rest of her.

  Gradually her swollen body filled half of the chamber. Taita jumped off the couch and backed against the wall to give her space to expand. She had taken on the shape of a queen termite lying in her royal cell in the centre of a mound. She was trapped within her own flesh, able to move only her head, the rest of her pinned down by her own grossness. She would never be able to escape from this cavern. Even if the trogs returned to help her, they could never drag her through the narrow rock passages and tunnels into the open air.

  A dreadful stench permeated the cavern. A thick, oily fluid oozed from the pores of Eos’s skin and ran down her carcass, each drop pale green with the sheen of putrescence. The nauseating odour clogged Taita’s throat and smothered his lungs. It was the smell of rotting corpses: the victims of her murderous appetites, the unborn babes she had torn from the womb and the young mothers who had carried them; the bodies of those who had perished in the famines, droughts and plagues she had bred and loosed upon the nations; the warriors who had died in the wars she had incited and commanded; the innocents she had condemned to the gallows and the garotte; the slaves who had perished in her quarries and mines. It was compounded by the fetor of an immense evil that issued from her mouth with every rasping breath she exhaled. Even Taita’s control of his senses wavered under its miasma. Keeping as far from her as the confines of the cavern would allow, he moved along the wall towards the mouth of the tunnel.

  An ominous sound brought him up short. It was as though a gigantic porcupine was rattling its quills in warning. Eos’s grotesque head rolled towards him and her eyes focused upon his face. Her features were ravaged so no trace of her beauty remained. Her eyes were deep, dark pits. Her lips had retracted to expose her teeth, like those of a skull. Her features were ineffably ugly, the true mirror of her twisted soul. She spoke in a croak, harsh as the cawing of carrion crows: ‘I shall persist,’ she said.

  He reeled back at the rankness of her breath, then braced himself and looked steadily into her eyes: ‘The Lie will always persist, but so will the Truth. There will never be an end to the struggle,’ he replied.

  She closed her eyes and spoke no more. Only her breathing rumbled in her throat.

  Taita found his cloak, then slipped through the green chamber into the passage that led to the outer air. As he came out into her secret garden, the sunlight was striking the top of the cliff but it left the depths of the crater in shadow. He looked around carefully for any evidence of Eos’s trogs, searching for their auras, but there was none. He knew that, with her destruction, they had been deprived of a guiding intelligence. They had crept mindlessly into the tunnels and passages of the mountain to die.

  The air was cold and clean. He breathed it deeply with relief, washing the stench of Eos from his lungs as he went to the pavilion beside the black pool. He took his seat on the bench where he had sat with her when she was still young and beautiful. He pulled the leather cloak round his shoulders. He expected to find himself exhausted and wasted by his ordeal but elation filled his being. He felt strong and indefatigable.

  At first this bewildered him, until he understood that he was charged with the power and energy he had taken from the witch. His mind soared and expanded as he began to explore the mountainous accumulations of knowledge and experience that now filled him. He could look back over the millennium that Eos had existed, back to the beginning time. Every detail was fresh. He was able to fathom her lusts and desires as though they were his own. He was amazed by the depths of her cruelty and depravity. He had not understood the nature of true and utter evil until now when it had been clearly revealed to him. There was so much to learn from her that he knew it would take him a natural lifetime to examine even a small part of it.

  The knowledge was seductive in a vile and loathsome way, and he knew at once that he must condition himself to resist its addictive fascination, lest it corrupt him too. There was dire danger that the grasp of so much evil might turn him into a monster of her like. He was humbled by the thought that the cognizance he had wrested from the witch, added to his own arsenal, had made him now the most powerful man on earth.

  He rallied his powers and began to lock away the vast body of foul matter in the deep warehouses of his memory, so that he would not be haunted and sullied by it but could retrieve any part as he required it.

  In addition to the evil, he had now in his possession an equal or greater quantity
of wholesome learning which might be infinitely beneficial to himself and humanity. He had taken from her the keys to the natural mysteries of ocean, earth and heaven; of life and death; of destruction and regeneration. All this he held in the forefront of his mind where he could explore and master it.

  The sun had set and night had passed before he had assembled and rearranged all this in his mind. Only then was he conscious of his creature needs: he had not eaten for days, and although he had drunk, he was thirsty. He now knew the layout of the witch’s lair as if he had lived in it for as long as she had. He left the crater and went back into the rocky warren, finding his way unerringly into the storerooms, pantries and kitchens from which the trogs had served Eos. He ate sparingly of the best fruits and cheeses and drank a cup of wine. Then, refreshed, he returned to the pavilion. Now his foremost concern was to make contact with Fenn.

  He composed himself and made his first cast across the ether, calling to her clearly and openly. At once he realized he had underestimated the power of the witch. His efforts to reach Fenn were blocked and turned back by some residual force that emanated from her. Even in her enfeebled condition, she had managed to spin around herself and her warren a protective shield. He abandoned the effort, and devoted himself to finding a means of escape from the mountains. He searched the memory of Eos and he made discoveries that staggered him, taxing his powers of belief to the utmost.

  He left the pavilion again, and went back into the rock tunnel that led to Eos’s green chamber. Immediately the stench of corruption filled his nostrils. If anything, it had become even stronger and more noisome. He covered his nose and mouth with the hem of his tunic, and choked back waves of nausea. Eos’s body almost entirely filled the cavern now, bloated with its own putrid gas. Taita saw that she was in the midst of a metamorphosis from human to insect. The green fluid that oozed from her pores and coated her body was hardening into a glistening shell. She was sealing herself into a cocoon. Only her head was still exposed. The ruined tresses of her hair had fallen out and littered the green tiles. Her eyes were closed. Her hoarse breathing made the foul air tremble. She had thrown herself into a profound hibernation, a suspended form of life that he knew could last indefinitely.

  Is there some way in which I can destroy her as she lies helpless? he wondered, and searched his newly acquired knowledge for the means to do so. There is none, he concluded. She is not immortal, but she was created in the flames of the volcano and she can perish only in those flames. Aloud he said, ‘Hail and farewell, Eos! May you slumber for ten thousand years that the earth will be, for a little space, rid of you.’ He stooped and picked up one of the coils of her hair. He twisted it into a thick braid, then placed it carefully in the pouch on his belt.

  There was just sufficient room to allow him to pass between her and the glittering malachite wall, then reach the far end of the chamber. There he found, as he had already known he would, the hidden doorway. It was so cunningly carved into the mirror-like wall that its reflection tricked the eye. Only when he reached out his hand to touch what had seemed solid green rock did the opening become apparent. It was only just wide enough to allow him to enter.

  Beyond, he found himself in a narrow passage. As he moved down it, the light faded into darkness. He went on confidently, holding one hand out in front of him until he touched the wall where the passage turned at right angles. Here he reached up into the darkness and found the stone shelf. He felt the warmth of the clay fire-pot on the back of his hand. This guided him to the rope handle of the pot, and he brought it down. There was a faint glow in the bottom, which he blew gently into flame. By its light he found a stack of rush torches. He lit one, placed the fire-pot with two extra torches in the basket that stood ready on the stone shelf, then went on along the narrow tunnel.

  It was descending at a steep angle so he used the rope that was strung along the right-hand wall to steady himself and maintain his balance. At last the passage opened into a small bare chamber. The roof was so low that he had to bend almost double under it. In the centre of the floor he saw a dark opening that looked like the mouth of a well. He held the torch over it and peered down. The feeble light was swallowed by the darkness.

  Taita picked up a shard of broken pottery from the floor, and dropped it into the shaft. He counted while he waited for it to strike the bottom. After fifty, there had been no sound of it hitting the rock below. The pit was bottomless. Directly in front of him a sturdy bronze hook had been driven into the roof of the cave. From this a rope of plaited leather strips dangled into the pit. The roof above him was blackened by the smoke of the torches that Eos had held aloft as she had passed this way on her innumerable visits to the cave. She had possessed the strength and agility to descend the rope with her torch between her teeth.

  Taita removed his sandals and dropped them into the basket. Then he wedged his torch into a crack in the side wall, so that it would afford him a little light during his descent. He slung the handle of the basket over his shoulder, reached for the rope and swung himself out over the pit. At intervals the rope was knotted, which provided a precarious hold for his hands and bare feet. He began to clamber downwards, moving his feet first, then his hands. He knew how long and arduous the descent would be and he paced himself carefully, pausing regularly to rest and breathe deeply.

  Before long his muscles were quivering and his limbs weakening. He forced himself to go on. The light of the torch he had left in the chamber above was now a mere glimmer. He climbed down and down into utter darkness but, from Eos’s memory, he knew the way. The muscles in his right calf spasmed with cramp and the pain was crippling, but he closed his mind to it. His hands were numbed claws. He knew that one was bleeding from under the nails for droplets of blood fell into his upturned face. He forced his fingers to open and close on the rope.

  Down he went and still down until, at last, he knew he could go no further. He hung motionless in the darkness, bathed in sweat, unable to attempt another change of grip on the swaying rope. The darkness suffocated him. He felt his hand, slippery with blood, slide as his fingers began to open.

  ‘Mensaar!’ He conjugated the words of power. ‘Kydash! Ncube!’ At once his legs steadied and his grip firmed. Still he could not force his worn-out body to reach downwards for the next knot.

  ‘Taita! My darling Taita! Answer me!’ Fenn’s voice was as clear and sweet in his ears as if she hung beside him in the darkness. Her soul sign, the delicate outline of the water-lily bloom, glowed before his eyes. She was with him again. He had passed beyond the point where the enfeebled witch could block their astral contact.

  ‘Fenn!’ He sent a desperate cry across the ether.

  ‘Oh, thank the benevolent Mother Isis,’ Fenn called back. ‘I thought I was too late. I sense you are in desperate straits. I am joining all my forces with yours, as you taught me.’

  He felt his shaking legs still and harden. He lifted his feet off the knot and, hanging on his arms, reached down with his toes. The drop beneath sucked at him as he revolved on the rope.

  ‘Be strong, Taita. I am with you,’ Fenn exhorted.

  His feet found the next knot, and he slid his hands down to take another grip. He had been counting, so he knew there were still twenty knots before he reached the end of the rope.

  ‘Go on, Taita! For both our sakes, you must go on! Without you I am nothing. You must endure,’ Fenn urged.

  He felt her strength come to him in warm, astral waves. ‘Nineteen…Eighteen…’ He counted the remaining knots as they passed through his bloody hands.

  ‘You have the strength and the determination,’ she whispered in his mind. ‘I am beside you. I am part of you. Do this thing for us. For the love I have for you. You are my father and my friend. I came back for you and you alone. Don’t leave me now.’

  ‘Nine…Eight…Seven…’ Taita counted.

  ‘You are growing stronger,’ she said softly, ‘I can feel it. We will come through together.’

  ‘Three…T
wo…One…’ He counted and stretched down with one leg, groping with his toes for the rope. There was nothing under his foot but space. He had reached the end of the rope. He drew a deep breath, let go with both hands and fell with a rush that stopped his breath. Then, abruptly, he struck the bottom with both feet. His legs gave way and he sprawled, like a fledgling fallen from the nest. He lay on his belly, face down, sobbing with exhaustion and relief, too weak even to sit up.

  ‘Are you safe, Taita? Are you still there? Do you hear me?’

  ‘I hear you,’ he answered, as he sat up. ‘I am safe for the moment. Without you it would have been different. Your strength has armed me. I must go on now. Listen for my call. Surely I will need you again.’

  ‘Remember, I love you,’ she called, as her presence faded, and he was alone in the darkness once more. He fumbled in the basket and brought out the clay fire-pot. He blew the embers to life and lit a fresh torch. He held it high, and by its light examined his immediate surroundings.

  He was on a narrow wooden catwalk, built against the sheer wall on his left and secured to it by rows of bronze bolts driven into holes drilled in the rock. On his other side yawned the dark void. The feeble light of the torch could not fathom the extent of it. He crept to the edge of the catwalk and looked over it. Under him stretched endless darkness and he knew that he was suspended above a chasm that reached into the very bowels of the earth, those nether regions from which Eos had sprung.

  He rested a little longer. His thirst was raging, but there was nothing to drink. He quelled the longing with the force of his mind and drove the weariness from his limbs, then he took his sandals from the basket and fastened them on to his feet, which had been rubbed raw by the rope. At last he got to his feet and hobbled along the narrow catwalk. The drop on his left-hand side was unprotected by any balustrade, and the darkness beneath drew him with a hypnotic attraction that was difficult to resist. He went slowly and cautiously, placing each step with care.