While Tari learned rituals, Kinidad and their mother, the queen, had led the armies of Kush northward to fight the Romans, the hated foreigners who had conquered Egypt and now threatened Kush. Gloriously they had beaten the Romans, burning forts and carrying off booty. All the while, Tari had been left safe and furious in the desert temple.
But soon her fury had turned to resolve. She would not remain a useless pampered princess. If Apedemek, the lion, was the god of war, then she, his priestess, would learn the arts of war. Instead of burning incense and chanting hymns, she made the priests teach her how to handle horse and chariot, how to wield spear and sword, and how to shoot bow and arrow with deadly accuracy. Tari practiced for hours, then took long excursions into the African desert, her only companion the temple’s sacred lion cub, Naga. Tari had taken fierce joy in her warrior training and felt pride in serving the mighty Apedemek, shown on the temple walls as a muscular warrior with a lion’s head and wielding two great swords.
Now, with the news from the palace, all that joy and pride had dissolved. The queen had summoned her back to the capital, to the gleaming city of Meroe on the Nile. But she was not called to fight at her brother’s side. Kinidad, her cheerful, reckless brother, was dead, killed by the Romans. Tari was now heir, and her mother wanted her kept safe in the royal palace.
During the long chariot ride over the desert toward the lush river lands, Amanitari’s tears dried in the scorching wind. Her grief and fury remained. She had envied her brother, but she’d also loved him deeply. When she reached the palace, she didn’t even stop to wash but strode into the queen’s room, the now full-grown lion Naga padding at her heels.
“Mother,” she said without ceremony, “how can you think of keeping me here when I should be leading the next attack against the Romans?”
The queen dropped the papyrus scroll she was reading and fixed the princess with her one good eye. “I can think of it, daughter, because I must. You are now heir to the throne. I have already lost one child to the insatiably greedy Romans. I will not risk another.”
“You’d rather risk losing a kingdom? The Romans have already gobbled up most of the world. We’ve got to stop them here!”
The queen sighed and stepped toward the princess. Naga, crouching at his mistress’s side, growled. As Tari placed a hand on the lion’s tawny head, the queen laughed. “I see the god Apedemek does favor you, daughter.”
“He does, and he favors Kush too. But he won’t if we give up and don’t fight with all we have!”
“Oh, little one,” the queen sobbed, folding Tari to her breast, “I’ll never stop fighting. I lost an eye fighting the desert dwellers who are forever nibbling our lands from the east. And now I’ve lost a son to the Romans, who would swallow us from the north. I would lose my own life gladly if it would keep us free of their empire. But I will not risk our last hope for a great ruler. Someone must survive to lead Kush through the dangers ahead.”
With anger faded, the two sat sharing tears and talking about the years they had been apart, about Tari’s training and the battles with the Romans. The forces of Kush had taken several key Egyptian border towns, and thinking their victory secure, the queen had returned south to Meroe, leaving Kinidad in charge of the border. But then the new Roman general, Petronius, swooped down with fresh troops and reversed all of Kush’s gains, even burning the holy city of Napata. In that battle, Prince Kinidad had been killed.
“Surely you aren’t letting that go unavenged,” Tari protested.
“Of course not! Already new troops are assembling. We must try again to turn aside this ravening crocodile before it devours all the Nile and glides unchecked deeper into Africa. But no, you will not be going with those troops. Our family has ruled Kush for over a thousand years, and one of us must survive so we may rule for many years more.”
“But . . .”
“No. I will leave soon to rejoin the troops. I am old and expendable. But you, priestess of the warrior god and heir to Kush, will remain our hope in Meroe.”
Tari knew better than to argue further with her mother, but was far from accepting her fate. That evening she and Naga paced back and forth on the flat roof of the palace. The courtiers and servants respected her privacy, or at least respected the presence of her lion companion.
From there she watched the moon rise over the bluff to the east. In eerie silence, it lit the royal pyramids like so many faceted jewels set in silvered sand. One of those pyramids was Kinidad’s now, though not the grand one he would have had as king. Perhaps that one awaited her. She shivered. Naga rubbed against her, and she caressed his head.
Beyond those pyramids lay the desert; she could sense it even from here. The desert—abode of lions and home of the temple to Apedemek. No, she would not believe that her warrior training and lonely desert vigils were only so she could remain safe in this palace and at last lie under a ruler’s pyramid.
She brushed a hand across her cheek. Her scars bound her to Apedemek, god of war, protector of Kush. And she would serve him.
The next day, Tari formed and discarded several plans until a familiar voice in the courtyard below drew her to a window. The sound of Netakamani giving orders to a soldier flooded her with memories. In her mind, Tari could once again see Netak with Kinidad and herself, playing war games in the royal gardens or among the date palms and flooded fields bordering the Nile. They had been happy then, and always victorious.
“Netak!” she called joyfully. “Don’t go! We’ll be right down!”
Moments later she burst out of a palace door and threw her arms around her cousin. He hugged her back, then looked doubtfully at Naga. “When you said ‘we’ just now, I was afraid you’d been betrothed to some pesky princeling. But I see your companion is far more formidable.”
Tari punched his arm playfully. “I’ve always told you that if I married any pesky princeling, it would be you. But at the moment I am promised to the god Apedemek, and you see what a fine chaperon he sends me with.”
“Indeed, I will stay on my best behavior. But I’m so glad to see you! Though I wish it were a happier occasion that brought us together.”
She sobered. “You were with Kinidad when he was killed?”
Netak nodded. “That Roman jackal Petronius swept down on us at Pselchis, rejected our terms for peace, and kept driving us south. Your brother refused to return the statues we’d captured and dedicated as offerings to the gods. Petronius attacked and burned the great temple at Napata as if it were some worthless shed! Kinidad died defending it.”
Tari could picture her stubborn brother doing that, the same way he’d never given up in any of their games. Pushing aside memories, she asked, “And you are reassembling forces to return north?”
“Meroe’s blacksmiths have been filling barges with new iron spears, swords, and arrows, and new battalions have been training for weeks. I’ll be leaving at dawn with the first contingent. The queen will follow in a few days. We’ll pick up more recruits, supplies, and horses from river towns along the way.”
“At dawn? Good. Then we will go with you.”
He looked at her blankly.
“Naga and I.”
“Do you have the queen’s permission?”
“Of course not. But then, Kinidad and I didn’t have her permission to join most of your escapades before. Just think of it like that, as another game, only with much higher stakes.”
“But it’s not a game. It’s deadly real, and you’re the heir to the throne now.”
“That’s precisely why I must go and finish what my brother started. Besides, I am more than just the royal heir. I am a priestess of Apedemek. You don’t want to defy the will of a god, do you?”
Netak looked down into Naga’s large golden eyes and mouthful of gleaming teeth. He laughed nervously. “Certainly not a god with such persuasive representatives. But your mother is formidable too.”
“She won’t defy the god either, particularly if I don’t give her a chance.”
The trip northward seemed agonizingly slow to Tari, though when she let herself relax she enjoyed watching the banks of the Nile sliding by. Slowly the green fields and date palms gave way to drier land where the desert reached the river and villages were fewer and poorer-looking. In places, sunbaked cliffs brooded over the river and sent angry arms into the water, churning it white. Then, forced to land, the crews of the barges carried cargo and boats around the rapids until the river calmed again.
Tari enjoyed the company of the other soldiers, and though her identity was no longer secret, they treated her as a comrade. But each evening, when they pulled ashore to camp in wild desert places, she felt drawn away from the campfire gatherings. On the chill dry winds, she heard the distant lonely cries of lions.
She could feel Apedemek out there as well, and she knew she must obey him. But for the first time, she felt afraid. Before, war had been a game to play with other children, or moves to practice with friendly teachers. Now, with every day, it became closer, more real. Lives ended in war. Her brother’s had. Would hers? Would all her dreams of duty and glory prove as dry as sand blown over long-dead bones?
In those chill moments she would find Naga at her side, butting his head against her, moonlight gleaming in his golden eyes. Comforted, she would return to the others, but even as they sat and talked around the fire, the specter of fear and doubt lurked behind her like the cold desert night. Would she know what the god wanted of her when the time came?
During the days, life was too noisy and immediate for such worries. Then, in the golden calm of one afternoon, they came to what had once been Kush’s northern capital, the sacred city of Napata. The Romans had battered its grand houses into heaps of rubble, and the great temple now lay a gaping ruin. Its charred and fallen roof left massive pillars stretching uselessly to the sky like the carcass of a giant beast, ribs bare to the scouring desert wind.
Netak showed her where her brother had died. There, at the high altar, the army of Kush had offered their captured Roman statues to the gods, and there the vengeful Romans had seized those offerings and slaughtered the prince and his guards.
Tari knelt on the flagstones, now broken and stained with soot and blood. Raising her voice into chant, she publicly vowed that this outrage would be avenged. Then, when none but Naga was close enough to hear, she whispered, “Great Apedemek, if my life is indeed yours, give me your strength and your courage. I cannot do this on my own.”
They proceeded north, passing villages the Romans had left in ruins, until General Harsiotef, commander of this forward contingent, ordered them to shore, where they joined with forces that had marched overland. Assembling on a bluff that held back the eastern desert from the narrow strip of fertile green land fringing the Nile, they finally looked down on their destination. Below them spread the town of Primis, an irregular jumble of mud-brick houses. Aside from a few scuttling figures and roving dogs, the town seemed deserted. The obvious reason for this lay to the north, in the alien and menacing new Roman fort.
“They say Petronius provisioned the fort well before he returned north to Alexandria,” Netak said as he joined Tari at the bluff’s edge. “That will make a siege difficult.”
“It would be anyway,” Tari commented, “since the Romans could probably slip supplies through on the river. But what are our general’s plans?”
“The queen and the rest of the army should arrive in a few days. When they do, he plans to attack and push every last Roman into the Nile.”
Tari shivered slightly at the thought of her mother’s arrival. But though she would surely receive a royal scolding, it would probably be little more than that. It was too late for the queen to send her back to Meroe. Most of the troops by now knew that the heir was among them. They would expect her to stay and fight as her brother had. But it was that thought that most frightened her now.
Trained as a priestess and a warrior, she was prepared to fight. But she had never actually done so. She had killed animals in the hunt, but never another person. Could she? And could she evade their attempts to kill her?
She dragged her attention back to Netak as he talked on about battle plans and pointed to strategic features of the land. “But whatever happens,” he was saying, “we’d better launch the attack soon, because our spies report that Petronius and more troops are already headed this way.”
A week later, however, the Roman reinforcements had still not arrived, while the boats of the Queen of Kush and the rest of her army had. As Tari had hoped, frenzied battle preparations shielded her from most of the queen’s wrath, though the princess did her best to make herself useful elsewhere.
Mostly she distributed weapons and equipped the horses, but she kept clear of the elephants because her constant companion, Naga, spooked them into near frenzy. Most of the horses shied from the lion as well, but finally Tari found a fiery gray stallion that seemed to feel himself the lion’s equal, taking Naga’s presence in his stride. Tari chose him as her mount.
At last came the cold dawn she’d been yearning for and dreading. The sun god had not yet risen above the eastern desert when the forces of Kush began assembling in battle formation. The feeling in her stomach was as cold as the morning air, but Tari let that cold rise to freeze her face into a mask of fierce joy. She resolved that if she had to die, she’d do so in a way to make Apedemek proud.
As she scanned the assembled troops, her own feeling of pride blossomed. The shields and armor of the Kushites were mostly leather, not the pounded metal of the Roman armor that gleamed on the soldiers in and around the fort below. But her people were fighting for their land, not for the greed of some emperor who lived across the sea.
Again she hefted her iron-tipped spear and tightened the scabbard that held her sword of finest steel specially made for royal warriors. Nervously she reached over her shoulder and checked the feathered arrows in her quiver. Then she smiled at Netak, mounted at her side. In that moment, the flame of excitement and even courage felt real.
The battle plan had been explained to her, but when the charge came, she quickly lost all sight of plan and order. Elephants, chariots, horses, and foot soldiers surged around her. At first the Romans seemed to move with impunity behind their shields, as if they were large, scaled monsters. But in places their formations broke, and yelling Kushite warriors poured through. Everything soon became screaming, bloodsplattered chaos.
When her spear first found a Roman victim, Tari felt the shock go through her, almost as if she were that soldier. But she raised her shaking voice and cried “For Kinidad!”
Her second Roman, a foot soldier, she brought down with her sword when he tried to slit open her horse’s belly, and over him she screamed “For Apedemek!” Over the third, a mounted warrior who fell to her arrow, she called “For Kush!” These cries, taken up around her, mingled with shouts of anger and pain, with the screams of horses and the bellowing of elephants. Cries of terror rose too as enemies fell to the claws of the lion battling at her side.
Tari lost awareness of everything but the fever of battle and the bloody hacking rhythm of her sword. Time had no meaning and the battle had no form, but gradually it seemed they must be winning. The forces of Kush nearly surrounded the fort, and some seemed to have breached a wall.
Then, subtly, something changed, the way a fine day suddenly feels ominous with an approaching storm. At first she couldn’t tell where the change had come from. Then she saw it. Over the edge of the desert flowed a fresh flood of Romans. Petroniu
s and his reinforcements had been closer than reported.
The newcomers more than doubled the Roman troops and soon had the forces of Kush pinned between them and the river. The Kushites’ once victorious advance became a rout as they hacked and scrambled, trying desperately to live long enough to retreat. As the sun finally dropped into the west, only a ragged remnant of Kush’s grand army straggled back to their desert camp.
Tari was numbly surprised to find herself among them. Not daring to think beyond the present moment, she tended to a shallow spear-gash along Naga’s side, then applied healing ointment to the sword wound on Netak’s shoulder. The queen, she was relieved to hear, had survived as well. Most of the blood on herself, she found, was not her own.
That night the fires burning in Kush’s camp were vastly outnumbered, not only by the myriad desert stars but also by the Roman campfires on the riverbank below. Being the heir and now a proven warrior, Tari attended the council of the queen and the Kushite commanders, though at first her main struggle was not to slide into an exhausted sleep.
“What saved us today,” General Harsiotef was saying when Tari quietly joined the council, “was mostly the setting sun. If we engage the Romans tomorrow, we shall be destroyed as surely as a windstorm destroys a grass hut.”
“But surely we cannot give up now,” another general protested. “Kush has never assembled such a massive army.”
“And we have never met such an army either—incredibly well armed, well disciplined, and well trained. It’s clear how the Romans have conquered most of the world. You saw what their catapults did to our war elephants, and how their metal shields compared to our cowhide ones.”
“Are you suggesting that we admit defeat?” an angry voice said, and Tari suddenly realized it was her own.
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