Desert God (10 page)

King Beon had one hand raised, with the open palm turned towards us in greeting or in blessing; I was uncertain which he intended, but he was smiling.

In a few terse words I pointed out to Zaras the most vulnerable point in the hull of the royal barge where the strain on the ship’s main timbers was centred. This was slightly forward of the high podium.

‘Take that as your mark, Zaras, and hold true on it right up to the moment of impact.’

By now we were so close that I could see that King Beon was no longer smiling. His lower jaw was hanging open, exposing his brown-stained front teeth. Abruptly he closed his mouth. At this late juncture he had realized that our intentions were hostile. He dropped his hairy paws on to the armrests of his throne and tried to push himself to his feet. But he was ungainly and slow.

The courtiers packed into the barges on each side of his royal vessel suddenly became aware of the menace of our racing triremes bearing directly down on them. The wild screams of the women carried clearly to where I stood. The men were struggling to reach the sides of the anchored barges, unsheathing their weapons and challenging us with futile war cries and bellows of rage. I saw many of their women knocked down and trampled. Others were carried forward to the ship’s side. They jumped or they were shoved overboard into the Nile. We came down on this confusion like a mountain avalanche.

‘Oars!’ Zaras shouted the command loudly enough to be heard above the wailing and shrieking of the Hyksos. The rowers on each side of our trireme lifted their oars to the vertical position and clamped them in their buckets so they would not be sheared off by the impact. Our speed was undiminished as we covered the last few yards of open water.

At the last moment before impact I dropped to my knees on the deck and braced myself against the rowing bench in front of me. I saw that the men around me were at last taking my instruction seriously. Every one of them was doubled over with his arms locked around his thighs and his face pressed to his knees.

We struck the royal barge precisely on the point of aim that I had given Zaras. The massive bronze ram on our bows sheared through her timbers with a crackling roar. Most of our own men were thrown from the rowing benches to the deck by the collision, but I managed to keep my grip on the sturdy hardwood bench. I was able to see everything that was happening around me.

I watched as the full force and weight of our trireme was concentrated on one small area of the royal barge’s side. Like the blade of a heavy axe striking a log of kindling, we cut through her cleanly. The severed halves of her hull rolled under our bows as we trod her under.

As she went over I saw the Hyksos guardsmen flung from the steps of the royal pyramid in swirling profusion, like the autumn leaves from the high branches of sycamore tree in the gale winds of winter. King Beon was thrown highest of them all. His white robes billowed about his gross body, and the tangled braids of his beard lashed his face. He dropped back into the river with his arms and legs flailing. The air trapped in his robes floated him on the surface not thirty paces from where I was dragging myself upright, using the rowing bench as a support.

On either side of me the other triremes of our squadron smashed into the smaller barges of the Hyksos formation. They rolled them over effortlessly, ripping through their hulls, catapulting the panic-stricken passengers from the decks into the river.

The wreckage of the royal barge scraped down the sides of our trireme, to an uproar of tearing sails, snapping ropes, splintering timbers and the agonized shrieks of men being crushed between the grinding hulls. Our own deck was canted over at a severe angle, men and loose equipment sliding towards the port side.

Then our lovely ship shook herself free of the wreckage, and with almost feminine grace she regained her equilibrium and came upright in the water.

Zaras was yelling again for ‘Oars!’, and the men responded quickly enough. They heaved the heavy oars from the buckets and settled them in their rowlocks.

‘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.

T
he 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.

I
n 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 present, 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.