by Judith Tarr
But no. She could see the wall of cloud now, advancing from the west: blue-black and shot with lightnings.
The city’s gates had opened—astonishing, unlooked for. An army marched out, regiments of foot strengthened with a great force of chariots. Did they not see the storm? Or did they believe that their gods had brought it? Baal was a storm god. This could be his, this wrath of the heavens. Their priests might even have summoned it, in extremity, at the threat to their citadel. Had not Apophis said that Set would destroy his enemies?
The presence in the heart of Iry’s spirit, the bright warmth that, she had been assured, was the great goddess, was still. The Mare was gone; she lived, but Iry did not know where.
Iry had believed implicitly that the Two Lands would be one again; that Ahmose would have the victory, and Egypt would be whole. But now, in a fleeing ship, with a storm like the gods’ own wrath pursuing them and the army of the Retenu speeding before it, her faith wavered.
The wind had begun to blow from the west, lightly but distinctly. Naukrates bade his sailors run up the sail, but wait on his command; when the wind freshened, he said, they must drop it again. For the moment the wind was their ally, bearing them swiftly down the river. All about them the ships, both Cretan and Egyptian, had done the same. The golden flagship, clumsy thing that it was, rode somewhat in the rear of the fleet, but it was well warded by smaller, quicker craft.
They ran downriver till the city was out of sight, till they had found a place that the pilots knew: a bend in that branch of the river, and a landscape of fields, stripped now by the harvest, and a string of little villages. The people had come running out to see the ships, crying in dismay: “Defeat? Is it defeat?”
“Take cover!” the men on the ships roared back. “Take cover and pray. The wrath of Set is upon us!”
The villagers wailed and scattered and fled. The ships ran up on the banks, their crews battening and stowing and securing as they went, pulling down masts and sails where they could. Fighting men ran to mark the edge of a camp, to surround it and hold it with the weapons that they had, and with the chariots as they came up. It was a madness of haste in a rising wind, a breath of cold such as Egypt seldom knew, damp cold that made Iry think of deep water.
The army on foot was still running, the enemy closing in behind. Kemni’s chariots turned in a great arc and bore down on them. A hundred chariots, that had seemed so many in the war’s beginning, proved to be distressingly few against the enemy’s strength. And yet, from the shelter of the ships, neither the captain nor his charioteers seemed afraid. Sadana’s mounted warriors were riding amid the chariots, not far behind the commander, like a guard of honor.
The wind blew strong now, lashing the reeds and the marsh-grasses beyond the fields. Most of the ships’ crews had taken shelter behind or beneath careened hulls.
The servants and the baggage came up, staggering with exhaustion—they were not made to run so fast or so far. Those in the rear were wounded, some of them, by the enemy’s arrows. He had not caught them, but their rearguard had turned at bay behind the wall of chariots. It was a thin line, perilously thin. It was all they had.
Iry made her way through a freshening gale to the king’s ship, where the king was sheltered, and not happily, either. Even as she came, his lords and his queens were remonstrating with him. “I will summon my chariot,” he said against them. “If I am to lose the war for this ill choice, then let me lose it from the thick of a battle.”
“You haven’t lost it yet,” Iry said.
It seemed a terribly obvious thing to say, but everyone regarded her as if she had proposed a thing unheard of. Their eyes were rolling white. The sky’s darkening even before the sun had come to noon, the wind’s howling, the flash and flare of the lightning and the roll of thunder, had reft them of their wits. Even as she stood swaying in the gale, lightning leaped across the sky, branching like the river in the Delta, stream upon stream upon stream, till with a hiss it died. Thunder snarled in its wake, mounting to a roar.
Iry spoke above it, pitching her voice as she had been taught, as priestesses learned to do. “The war is not lost. My lord, stay. Wait. Trust the gods.”
That steadied him, somewhat. He still champed and snorted like a stallion shut in walls, but he had stopped insisting that he fling himself into the battle. He was needed here, where the army could see him, and where the runners could come, seeking his commands or his counsel.
But having given him that wisdom, she undertook to slip away herself, only to meet a large and living wall. Iannek and Khayan together stood in her way. She had not known that they were the same size exactly. It was like looking at two images of the same man, one shorn and dressed in the Egyptian fashion, the other all Retenu from his crown of battle-plaits to his booted feet.
They kept her there, as trammeled as the king. She tried to thrust past them. It was like throwing herself against stone.
And the world went mad.
~~~
The wind swept down like a monstrous hand. The skies opened as if an icy river had poured itself out upon the earth. Thunder pealed and pealed and pealed again. Lightning cracked the sky.
There could be no battle in this, except the battle of earth and heaven. Even the greatest of them cowered in whatever shelter they had. The bulk of Dancer’s hull barely held off the torrents of water—and it was made to withstand the sea. Iry saw a man plucked like a feather from the boat he had been clinging to, and flung far and hard. She saw lightning strike an upended hull and cleave it in two, and leave the men beneath it stunned, exposed, and drowning in that terrible rain. It stripped kilts from men’s bodies, helmets from their heads; wrested weapons from their hands. It had no mercy, no mind or will but to break and flatten and destroy.
Iry in her shelter, sheltered further by two large warm bodies, could only huddle and endure. Strong arms circled her. She would have loved to bury her face in Khayan’s breast, but she had to see. She had to know: What this storm wrought. What was coming at her, whether lightning or wind or rain.
It seemed to go on forever. It lasted perhaps an hour of the sun, perhaps more, perhaps less. Such storms, the Cretan sailors would tell her, could last much longer, even for days. But this, for this country, was enough.
When it ended, the silence was so complete that she wondered if that last peal of thunder had deafened her. The rain lightened little by little till it was all but gone. The wind died. The clouds endured, black and boiling overhead, but the western horizon brightened slowly.
They crept out one by one, great lords and warriors reduced to frightened children. They were wet, mud-spattered. Many were naked.
They stood in a field of mud and water. The villages were gone, heaps of rubble and melted mudbrick standing in their places. People crept about them as about the boats and the battered ships. There were wounded and dead.
It was a battlefield of the gods. Slowly, out of it, the army took shape again. It was beaten and battered and white about the eyes, but it had taken fewer losses than anyone feared. Even the chariots: some of the horses had broken loose and escaped, and some of the chariots were broken, or chariots and teams had vanished, but when they had gathered, they were most of them alive, conscious, and not too badly wounded.
Of the enemy’s army there were few left standing. A wind of wrath had caught them, and lightning pursued them. Those who lived had fled.
“But they raised the storm,” Iannek said, speaking for them all.
“It seems their gods were not pleased to be disturbed,” the king said. He was shaken as they all were, but he had mustered his courage and firmed his strength. At his command, men gathered what little of the baggage had survived and made camp, guarding it with such weapons as they had. Others were set to work taking count of casualties, examining the ships for seaworthiness, and, not least, offering prayers of thanks to the gods that they had been spared. A few even went up to the villages— “For these are my people,” Ahmose said. “If I would
rule them, I should protect them.”
~~~
Messengers began to come in before sundown, runners white-faced with shock, speaking of a storm that had swept the whole of the Lower Kingdom from Memphis to Avaris and beyond it. Baal the storm-god, Set the destroyer, had risen in wrath. Avaris in its high walls had suffered less than some, but roofs were torn away, walls battered, and the gate broken where the siege-engines had weakened it. Lightning had struck its bindings of bronze and half burned, half shattered it.
Apophis had not surrendered. “Not yet,” Ahmose said.
He could not travel for what was left of that day. But in the morning, all ships that could sail would sail, and all of the army that could march, would march on Avaris. The broken, the hurt, and the stragglers would stay behind. Ahmose would take Avaris, or he would go down in defeat, felled by the Retenu as even the gods’ lightnings had not been able to do.
VII
It was a mad thing they did, marching and rowing back through storm-ravaged country on a river that ran strong and high as in the flood time. But if they lingered, their retreat would become the truth. Avaris could restore itself, muster its armies, and repair its gates. And Ahmose would have no strength to take it. More—if the storm had struck the Upper Kingdom as well as the Lower, and rumors said that it did, then he would have to turn and retreat as Karnose had done before him, and go to the aid of his people.
But first, if he could, he would take Avaris. He took the city by surprise: gates open, people clearing away stormwrack, watchers on the walls more intent on the labors below than on attack from an army that they had reckoned fled and then destroyed.
The fleet, such of it as had come whole from the storm, bore down on them. Ahmose’s army on foot and in chariots drove for the broken gate. They had one chance, one battle. That, they all knew. If they lost, they lost the war. There was no strength in them for more, nor provisions, nor weapons to sustain a new siege.
Desperation drove them. This was the end of it, for victory or for defeat. When the sun set, there would be one king in the Two Lands—but it might be Apophis.
Kemni found that he could, after all, care what became of any of them. He had no desire to be a Retenu slave. Not again.
Iry, who had been both slave and more than queen to the foreign kings, had found the Mare waiting for her when she woke before dawn, standing white and glimmering in the last of the starlight. She rode with Kemni now, for all that anyone could say. Sadana’s women rode as her escort. The two brothers of the Retenu, Khayan and Iannek, had demanded for themselves a chariot—and Ahmose had bidden Kemni give them one. Two charioteers marched with the footsoldiers because of that, and not to his delight, either; but he could not defy the king.
At least, he thought sourly, if the two of them did not turn traitor, they were more skilled in chariotry than any of his own men. After a brief squabble, settled by Khayan’s fist, Iannek held the reins, and Khayan, in his brother’s armor, stood in the warrior’s place. Iannek’s eye was swelling already and turning a glorious shade of purple-black. He looked remarkably cheerful in spite of that, and remarkably odd in an Egyptian kilt.
There was a wild joy in what they did, this last cast of the bones, win or lose, live or die. The air was washed clean after the storm’s passing, the sun bright as new gold. Broken houses, shattered villages, lands flooded long out of season—they were all one with this descent on Avaris.
The Cretan ships had run up their wine-dark sails, riding a wind that seemed intent on driving them into the city’s heart. The Egyptian fleet, which had fared less well, followed as it could, the flagship of gold battered but afloat, and the king standing high on it in his golden armor.
The fleet struck the strongest blows, as it well could. They who fought on land served chiefly to bar the enemy’s escape and offer battle to whoever tried to flee through the landward gates. Kemni had the north: that, the king thought, would be most likely to lure Apophis and his court, since northward was their own country, and some hope of escape.
Kemni hoped that Ahmose saw truly; that Apophis would not simply shut himself up in his citadel and hold fast till the Egyptians went away. But there was a kingdom to restore, and that could not be done from a citadel in the midst of a siege. Apophis too, Ahmose thought, would wish to get it over.
The chariots were not to enter the city—that command was explicit. The companies on foot would drive within if they could, but Kemni’s men were to hold the open field.
They had groaned on being told that; Ay the headstrong spoke for them all when he muttered, “What, we stand about again, and wait again, and lose again all our hopes for glory?”
Not this time. The great gates hung askew. Figures milled within. Women shrieked, children cried. Men’s voices bellowed orders.
Kemni touched Sadana’s shoulder. She slowed the horses. He raised his hand so that they all might see and do as he did. They rolled to a halt in a long line before the gate and the walls, as steady as they could be amid the wreck of the siege-engines, broken fragments that the camp had left behind, and the pits of the privies still open and reeking and buzzing with flies.
The foot-companies pressed on, so that the chariots guarded their backs. As they neared the broken gates, men began to stream out of it, bearded men in armor of leather or scale mail.
They met with a clash like two swords meeting. Kemni held the line, though his men champed and pawed, as restless as their own stallions. Body collided with body, bronze with bronze.
Kemni watched, alert. Ahmose had been precise as to when the chariots might drive forward.
There. The line of Egyptians swayed back; hung as if in midair; then swung strongly forward.
“Now,” Kemni said to Sadana.
His team of bays leaped forward. He clutched the chariot’s sides before he pitched backwards out of it—ignominious as that would have been, at the very taking of Avaris. The wind of the stallions’ speed sang in his ears.
The footsoldiers gave way before the chariots, opening paths to the enemy. The enemy looked up and saw their death falling on them.
But they had their own weapon—as Kemni had been warned they would. Their chariots had been hidden behind the rubble of the gate. That was a flaw in their plan: they had to come out no more than two or three abreast, and slowly, over broken ground and past the companies of their comrades on foot.
The Egyptian foot closed in behind the chariots, returning to the fighting with renewed strength. The chariots pressed forward—but not as far as the gate. They had their orders. They were a wall beyond the wall. The enemy’s chariots could not flee except through them.
Kemni’s bow was strung—a Retenu bow, which was the strongest in the world, and needed a strong arm to draw. He set an arrow to the string.
Strike at the charioteers. That was the order he had been given, and that he had given his men. Not the horses—those, they could use. And not the fighting men, until the charioteers were down.
He raised the bow, aimed, loosed. Even before the arrow struck home, another was set to string. The chariot rocked and veered underfoot. He rode with it, keeping the arrow as steady as he might, focused on the target. Man in leather tunic, beard to the breast. No face to distract him. Simply the shape of his chest and shoulders, and the surety that the heart was there, as it was in every man. Kemni loosed, drew another arrow from the quiver, nocked, aimed.
One more. This one he saw fly wide, the chariot come on, horses wild-eyed and foaming. The warrior in it had no bow—fool, to trust to a spear, which needed closer quarters.
The chariot veered suddenly, rocking Kemni against the side. It half knocked the breath out of him, and let the spear pass harmless where, a breath before, Kemni’s body had been.
He breathed a prayer of thanks, and flashed a smile at Sadana. She was grinning like a mad thing, darting among the mingled armies, setting him free to fight as he could. They had gone as far as they might under the king’s orders; she turned and sent the
horses along the wall.
The rest of his people had done the same. The mounted women ranged among them, catching the wounded and bearing them behind the lines, and clearing away the dead. It was a strange duty, the more so for that, if attacked, they would fight, and fight well. But fighting was not all they did.
Close by Kemni, always, were the Retenu Khayan and his brother, fighting for the Mare and her servant. They fought with great skill. They did not, that he could see, regret the bodies they wounded or the lives they took. They were born to war as no Egyptian ever was.
He must not let his mind wander. He had to know where every man was, and every chariot. They were only to go so far along the wall, then they must go back. The gate was their charge. They were not to leave it.
He signaled the return, curving back toward the gate. Chariots came out of it still, and men. It looked like a wound, the city draining its blood upon the northward road. The river, they had never had. The south was Egypt. Where else could they go but north?
They fought harder now. The oncoming ranks were fresh, and his men were tiring. But they must hold. The king had commanded it.
There was no telling how the fleet fared. The bulk of the city lay between. Yet it must have driven in hard: among the warriors now were lesser figures, men unarmed or only lightly armed, children, even veiled women choosing the terror of the chariots over whatever passed within.
Women and children he let pass. Men died. That was the way of war. He rode over them, cut them down with spear or sword.
So they all did. No one had forgotten the Retenu who shed new blood among Egyptian wounded and dying.
He was almost cravenly glad to meet another outriding of chariots. These were richer than the last, their charioteers gleaming with gold. They fought harder—for they had more to lose.
“Is it—?” he asked Khayan in a lull in the battle, when they had drawn up side by side to rest the horses.