by Max Overton
Anger flowed over my father's face. "Then join your people in death."
The last man was hauled onto his spike, but when his screams were forced from between his clenched teeth, he ordered the translator to lop off his head with his sword, granting him a swift death.
My father drew me away from the place of execution and pressed a cup of unwatered wine into my shaking hands.
"You did well, my son. The example we made of those men will dissuade others from casting aside our just rule. The rebellion will swiftly die."
I sipped my wine, and when I felt I could trust my voice not to tremble asked what would become of the governors.
"Probably nothing. I will investigate the complaints and perhaps tell them to be less exacting in their duty."
"But they caused the rebellion," I said.
"No. Men like Baalbek caused the rebellion. My governors acted correctly, ruling with a bronze fist over an unruly people. If the tribes had a complaint against the governors, they should have appealed directly to me." He fixed me with a firm look. "You will understand more when you are older."
I said nothing more, but I wondered how an ordinary tribesman could ever gain an audience with the Lord of the Two Lands. I had seen noblemen turned away or kept waiting, and even when poor men came to have their grievances heard in the law courts, justice was not always meted out.
I vowed then that when I ascended the throne I would deal fairly with all my subjects, whether rich or poor, nobleman or peasant.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Year 3 of Baenre Merenptah
The army marched away in pursuit of the rebels and the camp gradually calmed down from frenetic activity to a semblance of order. Tausret stared at the dust cloud raised by the marching legions and chariots and considered her options.
"I'm going to follow them," she told Ti-ament.
"Be sensible, Tau, and wait for them to return. You're safe here in camp, but out there anything could happen."
"A donkey," Tausret said. "Where can we get one?"
"Don't think I'm coming with you. You'll get us killed or worse."
"I'll go alone then."
"But why?" Ti-ament asked in exasperation. "My brother left you in my charge but he didn't tell me you were a headstrong fool."
"Because I do not accept the limitations thrust upon me just because I'm a woman. Now if you don't want to come, I'll go alone."
"You'll never find a donkey by yourself."
"Then I'll walk." Tausret glowered at her companion and turned away, staring at the dust cloud rising into the heavens, staining the pale curve of the sky.
Ti-ament cursed, and Tausret listened in astonishment, having heard only some of the words before and none from the lips of a girl. "All right," the younger girl said at last as the spate of cursing subsided, "I'll come with you though it's against my better judgment."
Tausret grinned. "Thank you, Ti. Now, how do we find a donkey?"
"I'll do that. You take all our wealth and buy bread and water. Enough for two people for three days. One day to the battlefield, one day there, and one day back."
"If I take all our copper and bits, how will you hire a donkey?"
Ti-ament just shrugged and went off in the direction of the transport lines where a number of pack-beasts were stabled. Tausret headed for the kitchens and bought up several loaves of slightly stale barley bread and two large skins of water, lugging her purchases back to their little tent. She was just wondering whether to dismantle the tent and pack it up when Ti-ament arrived back, leading a rather scruffy looking donkey.
"You got one. How did you manage that without anything to bargain with?"
"I know one of the stable hands."
"And he just let you have one?"
"Not exactly. I gave him a kiss and a...a promise of something more." She shrugged and would not meet Tausret's eyes. "We'd better load him up and get going."
"Do we take our tent?"
"No. We can't let people know we're following the army. Someone would prevent us. So we have to make it look as if we are coming back by tonight."
They set off to the west, angling away from the direction the army had taken in case anyone asked where they were off to, but nobody did. As the camp faded into the dusty air behind them, they changed course, heading north and presently came upon the marks of a large body of men and chariots. Their progress was slow, however, limited by the pace of the donkey that plainly resented being dragged out in the heat and dust, and being loaded up by two girls and their supplies. The beast ambled along, refusing to move faster even when beaten by a willow switch.
The sun dropped toward the horizon with the camp invisible behind them and no sign of a battle in front.
"We're going to have to stop for the night," Ti-ament said. "We can't risk stumbling onto the army lines in the dark."
Their camp was basic. They found a rock and wrestled it over the donkey's guide rope so it could not wander off, and spread a cloth on the ground for their bed. Stale bread and tepid water was their supper, and afterward they bundled up as best they could in the gathering darkness. For a long time they lay side by side, shivering in the cold breeze that had sprung up now that the heat of the day drained from the desert, but long before the moon rose over the low eastern hills, they slept.
They woke with the dawn, cold, stiff and hungry. Bread assuaged their hunger, the rising sun eased the chill from them, and walking removed the stiffness from their limbs.
Midway through the morning, they saw that the course of the army that had gone before them had changed course, angling more toward the east. Tausret called a halt and looked along the churned up path the armed men had taken.
"I don't think we should follow them exactly," she said. "They probably saw the enemy and turned to meet them. If we follow, we could find ourselves caught up in the battle. We should turn aside so we view the battle from a little distance."
"East or west?" asked Ti-ament.
"West. We don't want the hills and if the army is going after the Sea Peoples next, they'll head toward the coast."
"I'm not going all the way to the coast."
"You won't have to. All I want is to see a battle, and then we can go home."
Tausret and Ti-ament continued in a slightly westerly direction, angling away from the course taken by the Kemetu army. Presently, though, they encountered tracks once more, and when they happened upon a body, knew that they had reached the outskirts of a battle that had already taken place. They looked at the body and shuffled toward it cautiously, as if expecting the man to spring to life again.
"Who is he?" Ti-ament whispered. "I mean, is he Kemetu or rebel?"
"Rebel, I'd say. Look at his body hair. Have you ever known a Kemetu man who looked like..."
"What's wrong with his right arm?"
"What do you mean? Oh. His hand..."
"It...it's been chopped off."
"They do that," Tausret said. "It's so they can count the enemy casualties. I've heard soldiers speak of it."
"I've never seen a dead body."
"What? Never?"
"Well, some of the old people in my village, but they'd been washed and shrouded and surrounded by grieving relatives. This man...he's so...so dirty and...and alone."
"I doubt he's alone," Tausret said. "If there's been a battle there could be hundreds of dead rebels."
"What if...I don't like to say it, but what if the rebels won?"
"They'd hardly cut the hand off one of their own. Come on," Tausret pointed. "That direction I think."
"Can we just go back? I don't want to see more dead bodies."
"I came out here to see a battle, or at least its aftermath. You don't have to come with me if you don't want to." Tausret started to move away.
"As if I'm going to leave you," Ti-ament muttered. "Neither of us would survive long without water or the donkey."
It was not long before they found other bodies; at first a few, and then scores, cut down an
d lying on the blood-stained sand like poorly harvested grain. Flies rose in a tenebrous cloud as they approached, and the stink of bodies starting to bloat and decay in the heat assailed their nostrils.
"Now have you had enough?" Ti-ament said, turning her head away.
Tausret looked pale, but pointed off to the east where something stood above the tumbled bodies of the rebel dead. "What's that? It looks like...I don't know what it looks like."
They skirted the dead men, picking their way through sand and rock scarred by the wheels of chariots and scuffed by thousands of feet.
"They all look like rebels," Ti-ament commented. "Where are the Kemetu dead, or was it just a slaughter?"
"Our men wouldn't have left their fellows behind. The priests will either have buried them temporarily or sent them back to camp with an escort. We must have missed them by looping away from their route."
They continued on and came to a clear space that bore the marks of much activity, of tent poles and pegs, flattened areas of sand, making them surmise that the Kemetu camp had been on this spot. A little distance from the camp, seven stakes still stood upright, with their pathetic burdens still impaled upon them. As with the bodies on the battlefield, clouds of flies flew up on their approach, revealing corpses seething with maggots. Ti-ament reeled back and bent double, vomiting up her meagre breakfast of bread and water. Tausret paled and turned away as well, fighting her own nausea. The sounds of her companion's distress tipped her over the edge and she fell to her knees, throwing up. After a short time, the two young women retreated from the horrible sights and rinsed out their mouths, trembling from the reaction.
"Why do they do it?" Ti-ament whispered. "Our own men did it, but why? It...it's barbaric and uncivilised."
Tausret shook her head. "I've heard of it as a punishment for treason, but I never want to see it again."
Ti-ament raised her head, hope flooding her face. "Does that mean you've seen enough? We can go back?"
"Yes. Only..." Tausret shook her water skin, listening to the liquid sloshing within it.
"Only what?"
"I'm not sure we have enough water to get back. We used nearly all of it getting this far."
"Why did we come out with so little then?"
"I was hoping we'd meet the army and they'd give us water."
"So what do we do?"
Tausret looked all around, at the desert and dome of pale blue sky, at the hot sun rising toward the zenith and at the bodies heaped and scattered over the battlefield. She pointed to the northwest. "Dust rising into the sky. That's where the army is."
"There's not very much dust, but all right, so it's the army. What are we going to do about our water?"
"The army will have water. I think it would be quicker to find them than try and find our way back to the camp."
"And if we can't find them or catch up to them?" Ti-ament wailed. "We're going to die out here, aren't we? I should never have listened to you."
"What a lot of nonsense you talk, Ti," Tausret replied. "Look, you can almost see the army. Even if they are still marching, we can probably catch them by sunset."
To save time finding a route around the battlefield, the two women picked their way through it, cloths over their noses to shut out as much of the stink as possible. Flies buzzed and swarmed around them, and the donkey kept shying at the dead bodies, but with an effort they passed beyond it and into the pristine desert beyond.
"There are no marks of passage here," Ti-ament pointed out. "We're going the wrong way."
"Nonsense. There's the dust cloud straight ahead of us and a lot closer. The army must have marched around for some reason."
They continued their journey, alternately riding and walking the donkey, trying to put out of their minds their ever-diminishing supply of water. The heat of the sun's disc beat down on them, creating ripples in the hot air. Demons of the desert sent spirals of dust across their path and formed dark pools of water ahead of them that taunted them and disappeared as they approached. The sun was sinking into the west, dazzling them as they looked to follow the dust cloud of the army's passage, when Tausret noticed something different about it.
"There are two dust clouds now. One is the army but there's a smaller one also. See?" she pointed. "Ah, it's separating, moving away...toward us even."
"Is it coming to help us, do you think?" Ti-ament asked hopefully. "We're nearly out of water."
Tausret wanted to offer her young companion some hope, but could not imagine how the men below that fast-moving dust cloud, chariots, surely, could possibly be aware of their presence. She glanced up and smiled. "I think they have seen the small dust cloud we have kicked up and are coming to investigate."
They stopped, exhausted by their march, and waited for the chariots to arrive. The dust cloud advanced and then started drifting to their left.
"They're going to miss us," Ti-ament wailed.
Tausret saw that their own thin column of dust was dissipating and drifting in the slight breeze from the northeast. "We have to get moving again. Those chariots need something to guide them."
The dust cloud veered back toward them and soon they could see two or three tiny forms on the horizon, gradually growing and becoming more distinct, resolving into a small group of chariots that raced toward them over the sandy ground.
"We're saved," Ti-ament exclaimed, a big grin now on her face. "Oh, I hope they've brought water with them." She shook her water skin. "I'm almost out."
Tausret was studying the approaching chariots, her hands shading her eyes from the glare. "Those look like lightweight two-horse chariots," she said.
"As long as they can carry us and have water, I don't mind."
"The chariot squadrons attached to the legions were heavier ones, though the scouts may have been the lighter type."
"So they're scouts."
"I hope so."
"Well, what else could they be?"
"The Kanaanites don't have chariots, but the Sea Peoples do."
"Stop it, Tau, you're scaring me."
"I don't mean to, Ti, but we'll know soon enough."
There were three chariots, lightweight, and drawn by pairs of horses unmatched by colour, as was common amongst Kemetu squadrons. They slowed as they approached the two women and donkey, and came to a halt some twenty paces away. For what seemed like an age, the men in the chariots, one contained two men, the others only the driver, stared in silence, and then the two-man chariot moved closer and the man who was not a driver spoke.
It was not in the Kemetu tongue.
Tausret spoke, identifying herself and her companion solely by name, giving no hint as to their identity.
"Ah, Kemetu. What you do here? Where camp?" the man asked, his accent thick and difficult to understand.
Tausret waved back vaguely in the direction they had come. "We are lost and nearly out of water. Can you give us some?"
"Why out here? You spy on Kaftor?"
Tausret shook her head. "We don't know anyone called Kaftor. We got lost."
The man said something to the driver of his chariot and laughed. "Me Kaftor, he Kaftor..." He waved his hand toward the other chariots. "All Kaftor."
"He must mean their tribe," Tausret murmured. Louder, she said, "You help us? Yes?"
The man laughed again. "You come. We ask question, you answer. If good, we..." He said something in his own language and hitched suggestively at his crotch.
"I don't want to go with them," Ti-ament said. "They just want to..."
"I know, but we don't have any choice, do we?"
The two chariots with only a driver took one girl apiece, and the man searched through their belongings on the donkey before remounting his chariot. He gave an order and the three chariots started back the way they had come. Tausret looked back at their donkey standing forlornly in the desert and gestured back at it.
"We can't just leave it. It'll die."
The driver of her chariot ignored her, perhaps not understanding h
er speech, and the man in the two-man chariot was too far away to hear. As the donkey realised it was being left behind, it brayed despondently before lapsing into a dejected silence. Presently, it was lost in the dust behind them.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Year 3 of Baenre Merenptah
The Kemetu army scoured the eastern hills and gullies, prising out every rebel tribesman who had taken refuge there and killing them. No further prisoners were captured. The hands were removed, counted, and the tally added to the record by the army scribes, and the hands went to join the others rotting in great linen bags. Custody of these spoils of war was not a duty the men looked forward to, but as the legions came down from the hills, carts were loaded with the noisome cargo and sent back to Ta Mehu in triumph. Now the legions turned their faces to the west.
Scouts returned from the plains, reporting the positions of nearby Retenu towns and villages, now largely deserted. Detachments of infantry moved out to each one with instructions to burn everything and kill whatever livestock could not easily be removed. Any male inhabitant over the age of ten was to be killed, and the women were to be dealt with as the officer in charge, often a Leader of a Hundred, saw fit. There was some good-natured competition among the men to be assigned to one of these detachments as the opportunity for looting and other entertainments was great.
Meanwhile, the main body of the army moved westward, toward a column of dust raised by what scouts reported was an army of the Sea Peoples. Other smaller dust clouds could be seen, but these were assumed to be groups of enemy scouts and ignored. Merenptah was of the opinion that they needed to make contact with the Sea Peoples and destroy their army.
"Then bring back the detachments," General Hotepnebi urged. "If we meet the main army, we will need every man."
"And if we wait for them to return, we give the enemy time to escape or prepare the ground for our attack. We must be swift and strike hard."
Hotepnebi continued to argue for caution, but the other commanders were eager to prove themselves in battle against a real enemy and argued the opposite. Merenptah did as he pleased, and ordered the legions forward.