“No, I will not ask you to betray Apepa,” he said with a sigh. “No matter where your heart lies in this matter, you will have nothing to tell me, will you?” Sebek-nakht touched his kohled temple in a curiously graceful movement.
“I do not keep my counsel because I am in sympathy with the Setiu,” he remarked. “I am an architect and a priest, Majesty. I know nothing of military matters and care even less. I would rather serve you in those capacities than Apepa, but it has been Apepa who has used and rewarded my skill. I am of a very ancient Egyptian family and unlike many of my princely fellows who glory in ancestors who wielded weapons or power, I take pride in a history of architects and priests stretching back more hentis than I can count. Of course I have power,” he emphasized. “I am a Prince. But I am not interested in using it to lead an army.”
“What a pity,” Ahmose murmured. “I was going to ask you to command one of my divisions.” He was grinning and Sebek-nakht broke into laughter.
“If you require troops well versed in the merits of limestone over sandstone or how deep a foundation must go in order to support a column of a certain weight, then I am indeed a good choice,” he said. “Otherwise, I would be a disaster.”
“We have military minds in abundance,” Hor-Aha put in sourly. “What we need are men who know how to tear down a glacis wall quickly and efficiently.” His tone sobered the company and there was a moment of awkward silence. Hor-Aha flung up his hands. “Your pardon, Prince,” he said to Sebek-nakht. “My words were not intended to offend. But I spoke the truth. The main mounds on which Het-Uart rests are girdled with such sloping designs. They are very high and as hard as rock. Egyptians do not build this way. Egyptian masons do not know what their flaws may be. The city’s gates are also high and solid.” He cast a dark glance at Ahmose. “Kamose took Nag-ta-Hert only after a month of sieging, and then only because the commander of the fort was running short of water and lost his nerve. Nagta-Hert’s walls were torn down from the inside after our soldiers overran it, and not before.”
“I do not take offence easily, General,” Sebek-nakht assured him. “I understand your need. But you know from Kamose’s success at Nag-ta-Hert that Setiu fortifications are not of stone. They are of sand and earth piled high and made stable with a canted facing of glacis. In my capacity as architect I am familiar with the advantages and weaknesses of various kinds of stone and I can plan structures composed of mud bricks, but that is all. I have no advice for you.”
“Apepa’s father doubled the height of the walls,” Ahmose said. “I have often wondered why, seeing that in his day there was no threat to the city. Perhaps he received an oracle regarding his son’s future.”
“Perhaps.” Sebek-nakht folded his arms. “But I think that the plague forty years ago frightened him. Het-Uart has always been a crowded, stifling warren of narrow alleys full of refuse and offal between row upon row of jumbled mud houses. No gardens except within the confines of the palace itself and a few tiny squares before the homes of the very privileged. No trees to speak of. Only noise and stench. Forty years ago the population had grown so vast that the city was choking on its own citizens. It was, it still is, overrun with rats and other vermin. The plague killed thousands of Setiu, so many that the dead were simply flung into open pits. At that time and for some time afterwards Het-Uart was vulnerable. Thus the improved defences.”
“They are a dirty people,” Turi said reflectively. “With the whole of the glorious Delta to settle, with room for houses with gardens, they chose to huddle together, pressed cheek by jowl in those girdled spaces. I do not understand it.”
“Yes, you do,” Ramose interposed. “They are foreigners. They do not know Egypt. They do not care for her beauty and her cleanliness. They are insects, ants teeming over an anthill.” Sebek-nakht was gazing above their heads at the far wall. He seemed to find something interesting in the brown trunks and green fans of the date palms painted there.
“I have lately been ordered to oversee the safe dismantling of Het-Uart’s cemeteries,” he said conversationally. “The small mortuary temples are of stone. They take up too much room. The citizens have been forced to bury their dead and even their donkeys under the floors of their houses.” His gaze dropped to Ahmose. “My Lord is distressed but there is no solution to the problem of Het-Uart’s limited size. It is only a matter of time before another plague breaks out or my Lord is forced to begin building extensions to the city on other mounds. Unfortunately for the common people, the northern fortified turtleback has become overrun with Setiu troops coming in from Rethennu to defend the Delta. Apepa had always stationed the overflow of his military contingents there, but now it is full to its limit and beyond. The few Egyptians who live on it, those who hold positions as administrators and overseers for Apepa and who have erected decent houses with irrigated gardens on the north-western edge of the mound where their small estates run down to one of the Nile’s tributaries, are not happy with the steady influx.”
Ahmose stiffened. The Prince had put a slight emphasis on some of his words. Irrigated gardens. North-western edge. He felt Hor-Aha’s eyes flicker briefly in his direction and knew that the General had heard Sebek-nakht’s almost imperceptible inflexion.
“Neither are we!” Turi exclaimed. “Before Het-Uart itself can be isolated and rendered naked, we must do battle with the infestation of these reinforcements. Our soldiers from the south do not relish having to negotiate the Delta’s swamps and orchards in order to fight, let alone fling themselves at walls behind which thousands more are hiding.” He sighed. “It is a disheartening task, Majesty.”
“Yes it is,” Ahmose admitted. “But time and the freedom to manœuvre are on our side, Turi. Eventually Apepa must concede defeat, unless the number of troops in Rethennu cannot be exhausted.” He turned to Sebek-nakht who was now watching him steadily. “Thank you, Prince,” he said simply. “Now I have a proposition for you. It seems to me that an architect in Het-Uart has few challenging assignments. If he has talent, he must become bored. I have need of such a one in Weset. The Queen is even now searching for someone to design a village, among other things involving far more than counting up mud bricks. Will you go and talk to her?” Sebek-nakht’s eyes narrowed.
“I am still supervising the razing of the cemeteries, Majesty,” he said with caution. “I am expected to return to Het-Uart very soon. I came home to confer with my Overseer of Crops regarding my harvest.”
“You came home to greet me,” Ahmose contradicted him. “I will not dissemble with you, Prince. I need you in Weset. Aahmes-nefertari needs you as soon as you have discharged your current obligation to Apepa. I am not asking for your sword, I am asking for your especial talent.” He spread out his hands. “I humble myself before you, Sebek-nakht. Cast your lot with me. I swear that you will not be disappointed.” A tiny, wry smile lit the Prince’s face for a second.
“I have always liked you, Ahmose,” he said, “and I respected your brother enough to give him my promise of non-intervention in his war. The Setiu do not belong here. This I do not dispute. It is also true that I long to work as my forebears worked, conceiving mighty monuments to the glory of the gods and the pleasure of the King. I tell you this. I will finish my commitment to my Lord in Het-Uart and then I will consider my commitment to my Lord in Weset. More than that I cannot promise.”
“Well, will you at least travel to Weset and give the Queen some advice when you have finished in the Delta?” Ahmose pressed. “She is facing several complex problems that might stimulate your architectural curiosity.” He turned a bland face on Sebek-nakht, who shook his head and broke into a full grin.
“Very well, Majesty,” he agreed. “And of course while I am there, I may very well be seduced by such problems.” Ahmose slapped the table briskly and rose.
“I am an accommodating King, sensitive to the desires of his subjects,” he said with humour. “See how readily I accept your terms, O Prince! Now let us go into your peaceful garden and relish the
beginning of the sunset while the aroma of our feast gradually fills our nostrils. Do you have any Good Wine of the Western River? But of course you do, doubtless presented to you by Apepa himself. Have it opened at once.”
Later that night, after the feasting and an amicable farewell to Sebek-nakht and his regal family, Ahmose sat on the deck of his ship with the men who had accompanied him to the Prince’s house. Around them the hot darkness fought with the pools of yellow light cast by the lanterns strung from prow and stern and the motionless Followers were little more than uncertain silhouettes standing at intervals along the railing. Ramose was half-sitting, half-lying with his shoulders against the cabin wall, his eyes on the soft sky with its intricate patterns of stars. Beside him Turi lounged on a cushion. Ahmose himself was leaning forward from his camp stool, elbows on his knees, but Hor-Aha sat cross-legged on the bare planking, his spine straight, the hue of his skin blending into the surrounding darkness. Only the whites of his eyes and his gold bracelet caught the lamplight. He was fingering one of his thick braids and staring thoughtfully ahead. From one of the boats behind them music came floating over the rippling opacity of the water. The Medjay were singing quietly in their own tongue. Ahmose listened contentedly. It had been a very profitable day. “Majesty, do you think Sebeknakht will keep his word?” Turi’s voice broke into Ahmose’s drowsy reverie. “Will he go to Weset?”
“Yes, indeed he will,” Ahmose answered. “He has spent the last year deciding where his loyalty lies, and long before he came home to Mennofer to meet me, he knew what he would do. Already he has given us valuable information.”
“He has?” Turi looked puzzled, his brows drawn together, and Hor-Aha laughed harshly.
“You would make a very bad spy, Turi,” he said, tossing the braid behind him. “The Prince gave us a clear picture of conditions on the northern turtleback where the Setiu troops are amassed, and a possible solution to the dilemma of how to get at them.”
“Apepa’s senior Egyptian servants, the aristocrats of the north, live on estates to the north-west of the mound,” Ahmose ventured. “That was the first piece of useful knowledge, Turi. The second was that they have irrigated gardens.”
“Well of course they do, Majesty,” Turi said irritably. “They are, after all, still Egyptian nobles.” Ahmose cuffed him on his bent head.
“Think, you idiot!” he said affectionately. “The mound is completely walled and yet those gardens are irrigated.” Turi smoothed back his hair where Ahmose had ruffled it. He did not speak for a while. Ahmose waited. Then Turi clapped his hands.
“Of course! Wine has addled my brain. There must be breaches cut in the wall so that during the Inundation the ditches from which the nobles water their gardens may fill. Then when the Nile begins to recede the breaches are filled in again, both to re-establish the defences and to keep the precious water for irrigation during the summer.” He looked up at Ahmose. “Those breaches are weak points in the wall. If they are opened and closed every year they cannot be very difficult to dig out.”
“Award Turi the Gold of Intelligence,” Hor-Aha said sarcastically. “The problem will not be a wall that will crumble easily. It lies in the fact that the Nile tributary does not dry out completely although its level falls. There cannot be much space between the water and the wall, and none at all in the winter. No room for more than a trickle of troops to gain the mound, and in winter a very wet task.”
“But perhaps possible for Kay Abana and his men,” Ahmose mused. “We will know more when we reach the Delta and the scouts have gone out.” He rose from the stool and stretched. “Meanwhile we sleep. Tomorrow you rejoin your division, Turi, and march with them, and you, Hor-Aha, must sail with the Medjay. You are all dismissed. Sleep well.”
Once on his cot he began to consider the information Sebek-nakht had given them and how it might be put to use, and his thoughts drifted to the man himself, how he would be going south soon, sailing on the summer wind out of the north into an Egypt where the parching heat of Shemu was suffused with the timelessness of eternity. Tomorrow I will dictate a message to Aahmes-nefertari, he told himself sleepily. She will be expecting him. He will be escorted into her presence. She will greet him graciously with that smile, the one that melts my heart. Perhaps they will meet in the garden, and all around them in the dazzling sunlight the drops of water on the grass from the gardeners’ buckets will glint and shimmer. Perhaps Ahmose-onkh will be there also, lying on his stomach on the verge of the pond while the frogs shelter under the lily pads just out of his reach and the tiny fish flicker like fragments of coloured silver far down in the murky depths… . He slipped into unconsciousness with a gentle longing for the familiar sights of his home.
Two days of rowing brought the flotilla to the city of Iunu, Ra’s home. Here the Nile divided into its two main tributaries, the eastern and the western arms. Ahmose waited there only long enough for the army to catch up to him before moving on. In another day he was passing the site where the fort of Nag-ta-Hert used to stand. He and Kamose had been delayed there for a month, trying to find a way past its deceptively simple walls. Nothing of them remained but an untidy mound of sand and earth in which young tree saplings and a few weeds were trying to take hold. Ahmose watched it slide by. The memories of that time were as fresh and vivid as ever, but examining them he found that the sharp bite of loss and grief for Kamose was beginning to be blunted. I am healing, he thought in surprise. Soon I will be able to say the prayers for the dead without weeping. Time can be a cruel enemy, but sometimes I am grateful for its passing.
Het-Uart was still three or four days away, but already the Nile was sending out little branches that meandered from the main stem of the eastern flow to wander through tiny fields lined with shade trees and orchards laden with fruit. Their level was very low, leaving hard, dry land on either side where soldiers might march. Ahmose ordered the Medjay to stand to full alert, and carefully the fleet sailed on until the city was no more than a day ahead. Then he had the ships moored and sent for Kay Abana, waiting for him in the relative coolness of his cabin. Kay arrived with the alacrity Ahmose had come to expect of him, bowing respectfully and taking the stool Ahmose indicated. Akhtoy poured beer for them and then went out. “It is time to put you to work,” Ahmose said to him. Kay nodded over the rim of his cup, drank deeply, and set it down on the floor beside him.
“Good beer, Majesty,” he commented. “Somehow the humidity of the Delta makes me far more thirsty than the furnace that tries to burn us up at home.” He wiped his mouth with one brisk swipe of a brown finger. “I smell this air and am immediately anxious, eager, and a little fearful, all at once. I hope that when Het-Uart finally falls, your Majesty will not choose to station the North up here. It may be beautiful but I hate it.” Ahmose smiled.
“Is your cousin behaving himself?” he asked. Kay nodded.
“He has been tireless in carrying out my orders. All that may change when he sees the reality of war but I do not think so. Where is the army now, Majesty, and what would you have me do?”
“I expect the divisions to pass us in the night,” Ahmose said. “Choose six of your scouts and have them ready to join the generals, one to each division that will be spreading out through the eastern Delta and along the Horus Road. The remaining five divisions will be sieging the city. I want you and the North with me, Kay. I intend to destroy the docks at Het-Uart and you must give me your advice regarding access to the northern mound.” Quickly he told the young man what Sebek-nakht had said. Kay listened with a frown of concentration.
“There must be thousands of Setiu troops crammed onto that accursed mound, Majesty,” he remarked when Ahmose had finished. “It will be very difficult to hold them off while our soldiers crawl through a few muddy holes in the wall. Better to try and demolish the north-west portion of the wall completely before sending anyone in.”
“I intend to keep them occupied by shooting at them on the eastern side,” Ahmose said. “It is a slim chance. But m
y six divisions will be engaging the enemy contingents that are ranging freely in the eastern Delta. They will not be able to come at the rear of my besieging force.”
“What of Het-Uart’s main mound?”
Ahmose lifted his linen away from his sticky thighs. In spite of the slight breeze that was finding its way through the wooden slats of the cabin, the air was thick and hot. “The flood plains around it to the south and east are dry and I will fill them with archers,” he explained. “Infantry will surround the gates. On its western side there is of course the tributary. The North will assist in defending the infantry who will demolish the docks.” He sighed. “You and I both know that unless the gates open we cannot take the city. Not ever. We can almost certainly clear out the Delta of foreign troops, set a large guard on the Horus Road to prevent more coming in, and perhaps we may penetrate and wipe out the concentration on the northern mound, but that will still leave the city itself unscathed.”
“If you stay up here through the winter, you can stop any food getting in,” Kay offered. “They cannot hold out for long without food.” Ahmose grimaced.
“It is all a puzzle of if and perhaps,” he said. “For me there is only the next move. Are your orders clear, Kay?” It was a dismissal. Kay stood.
“The scouts will link up with the divisions as they go through,” he assured Ahmose. “I presume that your Majesty requires regular reports from them?”
“Yes. Directly to me. If all goes well, we should sight Het-Uart the day after tomorrow. Have Hor-Aha sent to me on your way back to your ship, Kay. The Medjay must understand their deployment.”
The Horus Road Page 10