Desert God

by Wilbur Smith

  The bull swerved towards her and dropped its monstrous head. It hooked one of the long gleaming horns at her, and the point caught her in the upper arm. I saw bone break and blood fly as she was thrown high over the bull’s back. She hit the ground and I think the soft sand broke her fall. The bull turned to follow her.

  Tehuti reacted more swiftly than any of us. She raced forward to intercept the bull’s charge, screaming shrilly and waving her arms to divert its attention.

  She ran under its flaring nostrils from which the steam of its hot and stinking breath spurted in the damp air of the cavern. As she passed she snatched the tiara of roses from her own head and dashed it into the face of the beast.

  Taken aback, the great bull checked slightly, giving Tehuti just enough leeway to spin around and race towards where she saw Zaras only halfway down the curtains to the arena floor.

  ‘Zaras!’ she screamed. The bull hesitated for only an instant before it turned away from where Bekatha lay and came in pursuit of Tehuti. She was quick as a gazelle, but the bull was faster. It was almost on top of her when she jinked and changed direction, gaining herself a yard before the bull could follow her around.

  I saw she would now pass almost directly beneath where I stood against the rail of the balcony. I drew the sword from the scabbard on my belt, lifted it high and hurled it down into the arena. It struck point first and pegged into the sand with its hilt standing upright in front of her.

  ‘Get the sword!’ I yelled down to Tehuti.

  Once more Tehuti reacted with the speed and strength of a natural athlete. She swerved in her run and as she passed the sword she plucked it from the sand and settled the hilt in her right hand.

  The bull was almost on her again. It swung its head and the point of its left horn hissed through the air as it sliced past her shoulder. Tehuti ducked under it and doubled back on the beast, sucking in her belly as the bull brushed past her. Then as the bull tossed up its head to recover its balance Tehuti seized hold of its nearest horn with her free hand, just behind the point.

  When the aurochs lifted her on the horn she did not resist. Instead she went with him, jumping in the same direction. She sailed high over the aurochs’s humped back and as she dropped she straightened her sword arm and aimed the point of the weapon down into its withers.

  Here there was no bone to turn the point. With all her weight behind it Tehuti drove the full length of the blade down between its shoulder blades, transfixing the creature’s heart. She released her grip on the hilt and left the blade in the wound.

  Then she arched her back as she dropped lightly to her feet behind the stricken bull and pirouetted away, with both arms held high above her own head. She stood poised and watched the monstrous animal pull up short. It spread its front hooves wide apart, and lowered its head until its muzzle almost touched the sand. It opened its mouth wide and bellowed. From its throat shot a torrent of bright blood.

  Then it staggered backwards until its back legs collapsed under it and it hit the floor of the arena with a sound like the fall of an axed cedar tree. It rolled on to its side. Its back legs kicked spasmodically, and then at last it lay quiescent. The silence in the cavern persisted for as long as it took me to fill my lungs with air.

  Then the great god Cronus in the volcano across the bay gave full rein to his rage. He had been denied his sacrifice. The creature that was his alter ego had been slain in the precincts of his own temple.

  I raised my head from the spectacle in the temple arena, and I gazed out across the Bay of Knossos and I beheld a wondrous sight.

  In the extremity of rage Cronus destroyed his own stronghold. It seemed to happen very slowly. The entire mountain exploded into a thousand massive chunks of rock, some of them as large as Crete itself, and some much larger. They were hurled aloft by the catastrophic forces that were released from the very centre of the volcano that lay thousands of feet below the surface of the sea. The rock had been heated in this deep furnace until it melted and burned with a brilliant white light that seemed to dim the sun and illuminate our entire world. When the rock fell back below the surface, the sea boiled.

  The steam from the boiling waters exploded into spinning white clouds that climbed skywards again, obliterating everything. It was all gone: sea and earth and sky. Only the dense wall of steam remained.

  All this seemed to happen in silence while the world and every living creature in it held its breath.

  Then came the noise of the cataclysm. It had taken that long to cross the waters of the bay. The sound smashed into the island of Crete like a solid object, something almost as substantial as the falling rock itself.

  Even though we were partially shielded by the walls of the cavern that surrounded us, we were hurled to the ground by the ferocity and volume of the sound. We lay whimpering and clutching our own deafened ears.

  The sound and the quaking of the earth prised great slabs off the roof of the cavern above us. All around me men were crushed screaming and sobbing to death by the falling rock, and the floor leaped and swayed under us like the deck of a ship in a hurricane.

  I was amongst the first to gather my senses. But my eyes were still dazzled by the light of the burning mountain; and my hearing was dulled by the thunderous sound. I rolled on to my knees and gazed around the cavern. I was not the only person stirring.

  Zaras had crawled to where Tehuti lay beside the carcass of the bull. He was cradling her in his arms. I could see she also was dazed and bewildered.

  Hui was kneeling over Bekatha. He seemed afraid to touch her. This was a warrior who had bestridden many a battlefield, but he was terrified by the blood of the woman he loved. She was cradling her broken arm and looking up at Hui like a child seeking comfort from a beloved parent.

  I looked beyond them and I saw the Supreme Minos. He was standing in the opening of the cavern facing the clouds of steam which obliterated the place where Mount Cronus had once stood.

  The Minos was holding the frail body of his mother in both hands high above his head. I saw that her skull was crushed and her eyes were bulging out of their sockets. She had been struck and killed by the rocks falling from the roof of the cave.

  ‘Why have you done this to us? I am your own son, mighty Cronus,’ the Minos bellowed. ‘My mother was your lover and your wife. Could you not have accepted the sacrifice I offered you and spared her?’

  I knew that I had to kill him before he was able to let loose more evil upon our world. This time I knew he would destroy us all: my princesses, my friends and companions and me.

  I threw up my bow and shot the arrow across the cavern. It struck the Minos in the centre of his golden backplate. It transfixed his body, and black blood sprayed from the hole that my arrow had ripped in his armour. The stench of it filled the temple like that of rotting corpses that had lain ten days in the sun.

  The force of my striking arrow hurled the Minos bodily through the opening in the cavern wall. He fell from my sight. His mother’s corpse lay where he had dropped it, like a pile of old black rags.

  I jumped over the balcony wall and slid down the curtains to the floor of the arena. Then as I ran to where Bekatha lay I unhooked the sword scabbard from my belt. I knelt beside her and told Hui, ‘Hold her firmly. This will hurt her.’

  She whimpered as I straightened the broken bones in her arm, and used the sword sheath as a splint to fix them so. Then I took the wine flask from the pouch on my hip and handed it to Hui.

  ‘Give her as much as she asks for,’ I told him. ‘But it’s a fine Cyclades, and much too good for a ruffian like you.’

  Bekatha smiled through her pain and whispered, ‘Hui is my man. From now onwards wherever he goes, I go. His home is my home. And the wine I drink is his to share with me.’ I was proud of her.

  I looked around the temple and saw that the virago guards from the royal seraglio had fled. I thought that all the Minoan nobles had gone with them, but then I saw Toran standing beside Zaras and Tehuti with his arm around
Loxias.

  ‘Will you come with us, my old friend?’ I asked him, and Toran paused for a moment before he replied.

  ‘The Minoan Empire has perished here today. It will never rise again. This was prophesied five hundred years ago.’ His expression was sombre, but after a moment he went on speaking. ‘I have lost my homeland. But Egypt has lost her most powerful ally against the Hyksos scourge.’ He sighed. ‘Nevertheless Loxias and I will go with you to Thebes and make it our new homeland.’

  ‘I am afraid to ask you, Zaras and Tehuti,’ I said as I turned to the two of them. It was no surprise to me that Tehuti spoke for both of them.

  ‘Darling Taita, I love both you and Egypt but I love Zaras more,’ she said simply. ‘If I return with you to Thebes my brother will seek to marry me to another mad king in some other barbaric land. I have served my Pharaoh and my country to the very limits of my duty. Now I want to be free to live the rest of my life with the man I love.’ She took Zaras’ hand. ‘We will go with Hui and Bekatha, and find another home in the northern lands beyond the Ionian Sea.’

  ‘I wish I could go with you but I cannot,’ I told her. ‘My duty is with Pharaoh in Thebes. I will tell him that you and Bekatha are dead so that he will never send to search for you.’

  ‘Thank you, darling Tata,’ she said, and then she hesitated before she spoke again. ‘Perhaps one day, if the gods are kind, you will come to find us again?’

  ‘Perhaps!’ I agreed.

  ‘I will name my first son after you,’ she promised and I turned away to hide the tears that filled my eyes. Then I climbed the tiers of stone benches which now were empty. I reached the opening of the cavern wall through which my arrow had thrown the body of the Minos.

  I stood on the verge of the drop, and looked down three hundred feet to where he lay spreadeagled on the rocks below in a pool of his own congealing blood. My arrow stood out of his silver breastplate. His helmet still covered his head. I could see nothing through the dark eye-holes that seemed to stare up at me.

  ‘What were you?’ I pondered the question aloud, but speaking softly. ‘Were you man or monster, devil or godling?’ Then I shook my head. ‘I pray never to know the answer to that question.’

  The body of Pasiphaë, the mother of the Minos, lay at my feet. I picked it up and dropped it over the cliff. When I looked down again I saw that they lay together with arms and legs obscenely tangled like those of lovers, rather than mother and son.

  I turned away and went down into the arena where my girls waited for me. All of us left the temple and went out through the labyrinth to where the horses waited in the forest. We mounted and rode together as a family for the last time. We climbed the slopes of Mount Ida and we drew rein on the shoulder and looked back across the Bay of Knossos.

  Mount Cronus was gone, sucked back into the abysmal depths of the ocean once more. Only the turbid waters of the boiling sea marked its grave.

  Then we looked ahead to where the port of Krimad had once stood and we saw all six ships of the flotilla had survived the tidal wave, and were anchored safely offshore. They were waiting to receive us.

  All those around me shouted with joy and excitement, urging their horses down the path through the forest. They rode in pairs, Lord Toran with Loxias, Hui cradling Bekatha to his chest to shield her injured arm and Zaras with Tehuti up behind him urging him to greater speed.

  I hung back and let them go. ‘Let their separate journeys begin here and end for all of them on the Hills of Happiness,’ I whispered aloud, but my pleasure for them was tempered by my melancholia for my own self: poor lonely Taita. Then I heard a voice that might have been only the evening wind in the treetops.

  ‘You will never be alone, Taita, for a noble heart is the lodestone which draws to itself the love of others.’

  I looked around me in wild amazement and I thought I saw her coming down to me through the forest in her hood and cloak. But the light was fading and I could have been mistaken.

  OUT NOW

  RIVER GOD

  Discover where Taita’s journey began …

  A kingdom built on gold. A legend shattered by greed.

  Now the Valley of the Kings lies ravaged by war, drained of its lifeblood as weak men inherit the cherished crown.

  In the city of Thebes, at the Festival of Osiris, loyal subjects of the Pharaoh gather to pay homage to their leader. But Taita – a wise and formidably gifted eunuch slave – sees him only as a symbol of a kingdom’s fading glory.

  Beside Taita stand his protégés: Lostris, daughter of Lord Intef, beautiful beyond her years; and Tanus, proud, young army officer, who has vowed to avenge the death – at Intef’s hand – of his father, and seize Lostris as his prize. Together they share a dream – to restore the majesty of the Pharaoh of Pharaohs on the glittering banks of the Nile.

  Read on for an extract from River God

  THE RIVER lay heavily upon the desert, bright as a spill of molten metal from a furnace. The sky smoked with heat-haze and the sun beat down upon it all with the strokes of a coppersmith’s hammer. In the mirage the gaunt hills flanking the Nile seemed to tremble to the blows.

  Our boat sped close in beside the papyrus beds; near enough for the creaking of the water buckets of the shadoof, on their long, counter-balanced arms, to carry from the fields across the water. The sound harmonized with the singing of the girl in the bows.

  Lostris was fourteen years of age. The Nile had begun its latest flood on the very day that her red woman’s moon had flowered for the first time, a coincidence that the priests of Hapi had viewed as highly propitious. Lostris, the woman’s name that they had then chosen to replace her discarded baby-name, meant ‘Daughter of the Waters’.

  I remember her so vividly on that day. She would grow more beautiful as the years passed, become more poised and regal, but never again would that glow of virgin womanhood radiate from her so overpoweringly. Every man aboard, even the warriors at the rowing-benches, was aware of it. Neither I nor any one of them could keep our gaze off her. She filled me with a sense of my own inadequacy and a deep and poignant longing; for although I am a eunuch I was gelded only after I had known the joy of a woman’s body.

  ‘Taita,’ she called to me, ‘sing with me!’ And when I obeyed she smiled with pleasure. My voice was one of the many reasons that, whenever she was able, she kept me near her; my tenor complemented her lovely soprano to perfection. We sang one of the old peasant love songs that I had taught her, and which was still one of her favourites:

  My heart flutters up like a wounded quail

  when I see my beloved’s face

  and my cheeks bloom like the dawn sky

  to the sunshine of his smile—

  From the stern another voice joined with ours. It was a man’s voice, deep and powerful, but it lacked the clarity and purity of my own. If my voice was that of a dawn-greeting thrush, then this was the voice of a young lion.

  Lostris turned her head and now her smile shimmered like the sunbeams on the surface of the Nile. Although the man upon whom she played that smile was my friend, perhaps my only true friend, still I felt the bitter gall of envy burn the back of my throat. Yet I forced myself to smile at Tanus, as she did, with love.

  Tanus’ father, Pianki, Lord Harrab, had been one of the grandees of the Egyptian nobility, but his mother had been the daughter of a freed Tehenu slave. Like so many of her people, she had been fair-headed and blue-eyed. She had died of the swamp fever while Tanus was still a child, so my memory of her was imperfect. However, the old women said that seldom before had such beauty as hers been seen in either of the two kingdoms.

  On the other hand, I had known and admired Tanus’ father, before he lost all his vast fortune and the great estates that had once almost rivalled those of Pharaoh himself. He had been of dark complexion, with Egyptian eyes the colour of polished obsidian, a man with more physical strength than beauty, but with a generous and noble heart – some might say too generous and too trusting, for he ha
d died destitute, with his heart broken by those he had thought his friends, alone in the darkness, cut off from the sunshine of Pharaoh’s favour.

  Thus it seemed that Tanus had inherited the best from both his parents, except only worldly wealth. In nature and in power he was as his father; in beauty as his mother. So why should I resent my mistress loving him? I loved him also, and, poor neutered thing that I am, I knew that I could never have her for myself, not even if the gods had raised my status above that of slave. Yet such is the perversity of human nature that I hungered for what I could never have and dreamed of the impossible.

  Lostris sat on her cushion on the prow with her slave girls sprawled at her feet, two little black girls from Cush, lithe as panthers, entirely naked except for the golden collars around their necks. Lostris herself wore only a skirt of bleached linen, crisp and white as an egret’s wing. The skin of her upper body, caressed by the sun, was the colour of oiled cedar wood from the mountains beyond Byblos. Her breasts were the size and shape of ripe figs just ready for plucking, and tipped with rose garnets.

  She had set aside her formal wig, and wore her natural hair in a side-lock that fell in a thick dark rope over one breast. The slant of her eyes was enhanced by the silver-green of powdered malachite cunningly touched to the upper lids. The colour of her eyes was green also, but the darker, clearer green of the Nile when its waters have shrunk and deposited their burden of precious silts. Between her breasts, suspended on a gold chain, she wore a figurine of Hapi, the goddess of the Nile, fashioned in gold and precious lapis lazuli. Of course it was a superb piece, for I had made it with my own hands for her.

  Suddenly Tanus lifted his right hand with the fist clenched. As a single man the rowers checked their stroke and held the blades of their paddles aloft, glinting in the sunlight and dripping water. Then Tanus thrust the steering-oar hard over, and the men on the port bank stabbed their backstroke deeply, creating a series of tiny whirlpools in the surface of the green water. The starboard side pulled strongly ahead. The boat spun so sharply that the deck canted over at an alarming angle. Then both banks pulled together and she shot forward. The sharp prow, with the blue eyes of Horus emblazoned upon it, brushed aside the dense stands of papyrus, and she lanced her way out of the flow of the river and into the still waters of the lagoon beyond.