by Wilbur Smith
‘Reverse the stroke!’ Zaras shouted again. Only the rowers on the rear benches were able to reach the water with their oars. The men in the forward benches were blocked by the wreckage of the floundering royal barge.
Those who were able to do so dug in their blades and with a few powerful strokes pulled us free. Within seconds the severed sections of the royal barge filled with water. They rolled over and went down. An eruption of trapped air roared up to the surface.
I glanced over at the other two triremes. Dilbar and Akemi were bellowing orders at their men. Their crews clambered swiftly back on to the rowing benches, set their oars and picked up the stroke from the beat of the drums. The helmsmen were steering them back into formation on our leading ship.
Between us the surface of the river was covered with bobbing human heads, splashing and struggling bodies and shattered wreckage. The cries of drowning men and women were as piteous as the bleating of sheep being driven through the gates of the abattoir when they smell the blood.
For a long minute I watched the carnage in horror. I was almost overwhelmed by guilt and remorse. I could no longer force myself to look upon these doomed creatures as merely Hyksos animals. They were human beings struggling for life itself. My heart went out to them.
Then I saw King Beon again and my feelings changed in an instant. My wayward heart returned to me as swiftly and unerringly as a pigeon to its loft. I remembered what Beon had done to two hundred of our finest and bravest archers when his Hyksos brutes had captured them during the battle of Naquada. He had barricaded them in the Temple of Seth on the hill above the battlefield and burned them alive as a sacrifice to his monstrous god.
Now Beon was clinging to a shattered plank from his royal barge with one hand; while in his other hand he was wielding his bejewelled sword, using it to chop at the heads of the women of his harem who were trying to take refuge on his plank with him. He drove them away ruthlessly, unwilling to share his perch with a single one of them. I watched him strike at a girl child who was no older than my darling little Bekatha. His blade split her skull down to her chin as though it were a ripe pomegranate. While her bright blood spurted out to incarnadine the water around her, Beon called her a filthy name, and struck her again.
I stooped quickly and picked up the recurved war bow from under the rowing bench in front of me. The arrows had spilled from the quiver around my feet. I nocked one of them as I straightened up and drew to full stretch. Like any expert archer I always loose as the bowstring touches my lips. However, this time my hands were shaking with fury and the arrow flew wide.
Instead of taking Beon in the throat where I had aimed, my arrow pinned his forearm to the plank on which he lay; the plank for which he had killed his own child bride.
Zaras and the others who were watching me howled with glee. They know how well I can shoot and they thought I had deliberately winged Beon. I nocked another arrow, and this time I admit that I was playing to my audience. I deliberately nailed Beon’s sword-arm to the plank, so he was stretched out on the timber baulk in the attitude of crucifixion. He howled like the cringing jackal he was.
I am by nature a compassionate man, so I did not allow him to suffer much longer than he richly deserved. My third arrow went into the precise centre of his throat.
The crews of all three of my triremes followed my example. They seized their bows and crowded to the sides of our vessels to shower arrows on the floundering wretches in the water below them.
I was powerless to prevent it happening, or perhaps I lacked the motivation and inclination to do so. Many of my men had lost their fathers and brothers to these unwholesome wretches. Their sisters and mothers had been ravished and their homes burned to the ground by them.
So I stood by and watched the flower of Hyksos nobility being pruned down to the very quick. When the last floating corpse, bristling with arrows, was carried away on the current I regained control of my men and cursed them back to their seats on the rowing benches.
Totally unrepentant, still howling with bloodthirsty glee, they hoisted the sails and heaved back on the oars. We left the Hyksos to the mercy of their foul god Seth, and we raced on southwards towards Thebes and the true Kingdom of Egypt.
The border between our very Egypt and the territory that the Hyksos hordes had overrun was never clearly demarcated. The fighting seemed to fluctuate on a daily basis as attack followed counter-attack, and the fortunes of war ebbed and flowed across the land.
We had left from Thebes on the fifth day of the month of Payni. At that time Lord Kratas had driven the Hyksos invaders back twenty leagues north of the town of Sheik Abada. However, we were now well into the month of Epiphi, so much could have changed in our absence. But we still had the element of surprise on our side.
Neither the Hyksos front-line troops nor our own men fighting under Lord Kratas would be expecting the miraculous appearance of a fleet of Minoan warships in our Nile, over four hundred leagues from the shores of the Middle Sea.
There were no ships on the southern stretches of the Nile, either Hyksos or Egyptian, that could oppose our triremes. We had just proven that we were unstoppable. Of course, the Hyksos might fly pigeons to try and warn their troops who stood between us and Egypt. But pigeons are free spirits and fly only to where they were hatched, and not to any other destination that their handlers might prefer.
We did not anchor at nightfall; because we were now in familiar waters and we knew every bend and sandbar, every channel and every obstacle in this section of the river.
Six day and nights after we left Memphis, a few hours before midnight, just as the moon in its first quarter was rising, we passed through the encamped armies.
The watch fires of the opposing legions were spread out for several leagues along both banks of the Nile. There was merely a narrow strip of darkness between them, which demarcated no-man’s-land.
Our own ships showed no lights, except a tiny shaded lamp on the stern so we could keep contact with each other in the darkness. These dim lights were not visible from the river-banks. I did not wish to be recognized by either army so we kept to the middle of the river. We sailed through unchallenged, until at last we were back in our very Egypt.
In the dawn we ran into a small flotilla of eight river galleys coming towards us from the direction of Thebes. Even at a distance I could see that they were laden with Egyptian troops, and they were flying the blue colours of Pharaoh Tamose. I knew that these must be Egyptian supply vessels bringing up reinforcements for Lord Kratas’ army.
As soon as they saw our strange squadron bearing down on them every one of them put over the helm and tried to fly from us in panic. During the previous few days I had ordered my men to stitch together crude but effective blue pennants in preparation for just such an encounter. Each of our triremes hoisted one of these at the masthead and the galleys pulled into the bank and let us pass. The crews stared after us in astonishment as we sailed on towards Thebes with only a passing salutation. I am certain none of them had ever seen ships like our triremes.
This was a meeting that I would have avoided if it were at all possible. It was far better that the fate of the treasure triremes remain forever a mystery to the Supreme Minos in Crete. He must never doubt that the Hyksos were the false allies that robbed him of his hoard of silver bullion. To achieve this I had to ensure that our captured prizes, colossal and conspicuous as they might be, disappeared without trace. This was a task that might have daunted a lesser man, but I had already devised the solution.
In the time before our people were driven from their homeland by the Hyksos, before the exodus, our ruler had been Pharaoh Mamose. At that time I, Taita, was the slave of Lord Intef who was the Nomarch of Karnak and grand vizier of all the twenty-two nomes of Upper Egypt. However, amongst his numerous other titles and honorifics my master was also the Lord of the Necropolis and the Keeper of the Royal Tombs.
He was responsible for the upkeep of the tombs of all the pharaohs past and presen
t, living and dead. But much more importantly he was also the official architect of the tomb of Pharaoh Mamose.
My Lord Intef had never been gifted with any creative skills. His talents were vested more in havoc and destruction. I doubt that he could have designed a cattle pen or even a pigeon coop, let alone an elaborate royal tomb fit for a pharaoh. While retaining for himself the royal gratitude and favours that went with the title, he left the arduous work, that which was not to his liking or which was beyond his limited abilities and skills, for me to attend to.
My memories of Lord Intef are not happy ones. It was he who commanded one of his minions to take the gelding knife to me. He was a cruel man and utterly ruthless. But, in the end, I had decisively settled the score between us.
Long before that happy day it was I who designed every chamber and tunnel and funerary hall of Pharaoh Mamose’s magnificent tomb. Then I supervised and directed the builders, the masons, the artists and all the artisans that were called upon to labour in this enterprise.
Pharaoh Mamose’s outer sarcophagus was carved from a gigantic single block of granite. It was sufficiently commodious to encompass a nest of seven silver coffins, which fitted neatly one within the other. The innermost of these was intended to contain Pharaoh’s embalmed corpse. All this added up to a burden of massive bulk and weight. This had to be transported in great reverence two thousand yards from the funerary temple on the banks of the Nile River to the tomb in the foothills of the Valley of the Kings.
To accomplish this transit I surveyed and built a canal that ran as straight as any arrow from the bank of the Nile across the riparian plain of black soil to the entrance of the royal tomb. This canal was wide enough and deep enough to accept Pharaoh’s funeral barge.
Pharaoh Mamose had been overtaken by destiny and had never lain a single day in his tomb before the Hyksos drove us out of our land. When we embarked on the long exodus we were commanded by his wife, Queen Lostris, to carry his embalmed body with us.
Many years later, Queen Lostris ordered me to design and build another tomb in the savage Nubian wilderness thousands of leagues further south. That was where Mamose now lay.
The original tomb in the Valley of the Kings had stood empty all these years. More importantly for my plans, the canal that I had built from the funerary temple on the bank of the Nile to the royal tomb was still in an excellent state of repair. I knew this because only a short while previously I had ridden along the bank with my two little princesses to show them their father’s empty tomb. I must admit that neither of them showed much interest in this lesson in the history of their own family.
Even after all these years I was able to recall the precise dimensions of Mamose’s funeral barge. My memory is infallible. I never forget a fact, a figure or a face.
Now I measured the overall dimensions of our requisitioned Minoan treasure triremes. Then I ordered Zaras to anchor briefly in calm water, while I swam down to the trireme’s keel and measured the amount of water she drew with her full cargo of bullion in the hold. These measurements varied somewhat from ship to ship.
I returned to the surface well pleased with the results of my investigations. Now I was able to compare the dimensions of Pharaoh Mamose’s funeral barge with those of the captured triremes. The funerary canal would accommodate the transit of the largest of my triremes with ten cubits to spare on each side of the hull, and with clearance of fifteen cubits of water under the keel. What was even more encouraging was that all those years ago I had lined the canal with granite blocks and I had designed a system of locks and shadoofs to keep it always filled with Nile water.
It has been my experience that if you defer to the gods with the full reverence and respect that they deserve and expect, they are often inclined to return the compliment. Although they can be capricious, this time they had remembered me.
I planned the last leg of our journey to arrive at the entrance to the funerary canal shortly after the setting of the sun. In darkness we tied up at the stone jetty below Pharaoh Mamose’s funerary temple. Of course Mamose is now a god and has his own temple overlooking the Nile. It is but a short walk from the jetty on which Zaras and I landed.
It is not a very imposing temple. I must accept the responsibility for that. When we returned to Thebes after the exodus and we defeated the Hyksos at the battle of Thebes, my mistress Queen Lostris was determined to dedicate a temple to her husband, the long-dead Pharaoh. She wanted to honour him and at the same time render up thanks for our safe return from the wilderness.
Of course she summoned me to build the temple. When I saw the extent and sumptuousness of the edifice she had in mind I was shocked and alarmed. It would have overshadowed and outshone the grand palace of the Pharaohs which would face it from the opposite bank of the river. Pharaoh Mamose had almost reduced this very Egypt to penury with the erection of his two tombs: the one here at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings and the other even more complex and expensive tomb in Nubia.
Now my mistress, whom I adored and worshipped, planned to bring the nation low yet again with the erection of another astonishing building in his memory.
Fortunately I have considerable sway over her only son, the present Pharaoh Tamose, who is a sensible lad. To a much lesser extent I had learned from long and bitter experience how to control the wilder excesses of my queen. The dimensions of the temple to Mamose that we eventually settled upon were half the size of the tax collector’s building in Thebes, and I even managed to do away with the marble floors.
An establishment of this size no longer required the services of as many priests as my queen had in mind. I whittled away at her resolve until finally she threw up her hands in resignation and agreed to my counter-proposal of four priests, as opposed to her original estimate of four hundred.
Now when Zaras and I made our way up from the river to the rear entrance of the temple and walked into the nave without announcing our arrival we discovered the four religious gentlemen rather more than moderately inebriated on cheap palm wine. They were in the company of two young ladies who for some arcane and obscure reason were without clothing. They were engrossed in a prayer ritual with two of the priests of Mamose, which seemed to consist of rolling around on the floor of baked mud-bricks, clinging together and uttering cries of wild abandon. The two unoccupied priests stood over them clapping their hands and extorting the worshippers to a more strenuous display of religious devotion.
It was some little time before any of them became aware of our presence. At that point the ladies hurriedly retrieved their apparel and disappeared through the secret door behind the statue of the god Mamose. We did not see them again, nor were they mentioned in our subsequent conversation with the priests.
The priests of Mamose are well disposed towards me. Since the death of Queen Lostris I have made myself responsible for the payment of their monthly stipends. The four of them knelt in front of me, genuflecting vigorously and in the name of the god calling down blessings on my head.
As they knelt at my feet I produced the hawk seal of Pharaoh from under my cloak. They were struck dumb with awe. The high priest crawled to my feet and tried to kiss them. He smelled overpoweringly of sweat, cheap wine and cheaper femininity. I stepped back and Zaras dissuaded him from further demonstrations of piety with the flat of his sword across his bare buttocks.
Then I addressed the four of them briefly but firmly, warning them strictly that the presence of three large warships moored at the wharf outside their front door must never be mentioned or admitted to anybody but Pharaoh Tamose in person. In addition armed guards would be placed over their temple and the empty tomb at the far end of the canal both day and night. Only those men under the command of Captain Zaras were in future allowed to enter the sacred precincts. These same guards would ensure that the four priests themselves would remain strictly incarcerated within these precincts.
Finally I commanded the high priest to hand over to me the large bunch of keys to the tomb and all the other
monuments under his charge. We left them still protesting their duty and devotion to me and Pharaoh, and their strict obedience to my orders. Zaras and I returned to our ships.
The fall in the ground from the entrance to the Valley of the Kings to the dock on the river was less than twenty cubits but it required four separate locks to lift each of our triremes that height before we could bring them to the tomb. We rowed the first ship into the lock below the temple and then closed the gates on it. The water level in the lock was five cubits lower than that in the canal.
I demonstrated to my three captains how to open the ground paddles. Water from the upper canal then drained down into the lock and slowly lifted the enormous ship up to the same level as the upper canal. Once the gates were closed behind her, fifty men on the tow lines were standing ready to drag the great trireme down the canal to the next lock, while behind her the process was being repeated to raise the second trireme.
None of my men had ever seen anything to match this, which was not surprising because I had invented the system myself. There was not another like it in all the world. They were elated and excited by what they perceived to be witchcraft. But there was usually hard work involved in my kind of magic.
Fortunately I had over two hundred men to apply to this labour. These included the slaves that had been chained below by the Minoans. They were now freed men but they were obliged to work for their freedom.
The water that was drained from the higher canal to lift the boat had to be replaced. I achieved this by pumping up fresh water from the river by means of a battery of shadoofs. These were counterweighted bucket chains each served by two men. It was an involved and laborious business that had to be repeated four times with each trireme.
Before each boat was lifted through the first lock the sails and masts were lowered flat on the upper deck. Then the hull was covered by woven reed mats until it resembled a shapeless mound of trash. When the citizens of Thebes awoke the following morning and looked across the river they would see nothing untoward on the far bank. The three great triremes had disappeared as though they had never existed.