Pharaoh (6 page)

Narmer waited another half moon, till he had managed to stand up by himself for a few brief heartbeats, and was strong enough to sit upright on his pillows the whole day instead of lying like a baby. He waited till the Trader came with Nitho one morning, to change his bandages.

He waited till he had borne it all without a sound—the dead flesh and scabs pulled off with the linen cloths, the honey mixture smeared on the wounds, which still seeped blood and ooze at the edges.

And then he asked them.

Nitho sat back on her heels, the soiled linen still in her hands. ‘You want
what
?’

‘To join you. To serve your master. To learn to be a trader too.’ Narmer almost smiled for the first time since he had met the crocodile.

Nitho sounded too shocked to even translate. Behind her the Trader waited, peering at Narmer through his driedgrape eyes, as inscrutable as ever.

‘You heard me,’ he said to Nitho. ‘Could you ask the Trader for me?’ His heart was leaping as though he were about to jump off a cliff. But he kept his voice steady.

‘But you can’t!’ Nitho fought to gain control of herself under her scarf. ‘Prince Narmer, you don’t understand,’ she added more formally. ‘You’ll be leaving your home forever! We’ll never come this way again!’

‘I understand that,’ said Narmer slowly.

‘Do you?’ She gestured at Narmer’s room, the hangings on the wall. ‘You’ve only seen us living like you do, as guests of the palace. But my master isn’t rich, even if you think he carries riches. We don’t live like this most of the time.’

‘I know…’ began Narmer.

‘How can you, here in your safe River valley? Have you any idea what the desert is really like? What it’s like to face people who have never met a trader before, who believe a stranger must be an enemy and enemies must be killed, and to have only seconds to convince them to let you live? Do you know how to face people of strange towns and stranger languages and persuade them to take your wares? Knowing that if you fail they may steal everything you have? Or, almost as bad, send you on your way with no food or water, and no guides to find any?’

‘Of course I don’t know,’ said Narmer quietly. ‘But I want to.’

Nitho’s big eyes gazed intently at him over her scarf. Then she turned to the Trader and began to speak.

Narmer tried to follow their conversation. He had picked up a little of the Trader’s language now. What was Nitho
saying so vehemently? Was she arguing that he should come? Or stay?

As usual the Trader’s expression was impossible to read. But somehow Narmer didn’t think he looked surprised.

Finally Nitho turned to him again. ‘My master says, “Why should we take a boy who stumbles instead of walks? What can you offer us in return?”’

Narmer had thought of this over the days and nights he had lain here.

Even the bracelets on his arms were Hawk’s now. Nor did he have other languages, like Nitho. But there was one thing he did have.

‘I beat your master out of two and a half cups of gold,’ he said. ‘Next time I will be on his side and get the gold for him.’

Nitho translated. The Trader grinned and spoke to her briefly.

‘He agrees,’ said Nitho.

‘What? Just like that?’ Narmer had been prepared to argue, even plead, to bargain for this just like he had bargained with the Trader before.

‘My master says,’ Nitho continued, ‘that if you’re not worth your bread we can just leave you in the desert for the jackals. No loss to us either way.’ But she looked startled too, as though the Trader’s words had surprised her.

Narmer stared at the Trader. Was he serious? The man’s eyes crinkled, as though he were laughing at a joke no one else had heard.

Was this some kind of test?

‘Good,’ Narmer said evenly. ‘Then it’s a fair trade. No loss on either side.’

‘Except your life, perhaps,’ said Nitho drily.

Narmer shrugged. At the moment his life didn’t seem much to risk.

Seknut cried. Her face screwed up like a pomegranate left too long in the sun. She covered her face with her hands to try to hide her sobs.

‘Into the Endless Desert! No one survives the desert!’

‘The People of the Sand do.’

Narmer felt like crying too. But he hadn’t cried before—when the crocodile attacked; when the King made Hawk his heir. He wouldn’t let himself cry now, either. If only he could take Seknut with him! But an old woman would never survive the desert. And a Trader’s apprentice did not have servants.

Seknut shook her head without replying, the tears streaming down her cheeks. The People of the Sand were barbarians. The River was the only world she knew.

But there is another world beyond the River, thought Narmer. A world of giant boats and lands of strange treasures. A new excitement was growing within him.

He told his father privately, kneeling on his cushion before the throne.

He expected the King to object, to plead with him not to go. But he didn’t. Instead his father sat silently on his throne, while the noises of the palace lapped over them: the songs of the women in the kitchen courtyard, the sounds of their chopping, the cry of a plover near the River.

Finally the King said, ‘Good.’

The word hurt, even more than the teeth of the crocodile. But Narmer understood. Even crippled, he was a
threat to Hawk. The new rule would be easier with Narmer gone. The King had spoken, not his father.

‘I wish…’ Suddenly it was his father talking, not the King. ‘I wish it could be different. If I could give my life for yours, my legs to the crocodile in exchange for yours…’ His father’s fingers gripped the chair arms so tightly the knuckles were white.

Was he going to say ‘I would give anything for you to be my heir, not Hawk’?

Suddenly Narmer knew he couldn’t bear to hear the words. Nor should a king say them.

Instead Narmer used his crutch to lift himself from his cushion and threw his arms round his father. It was unheard of; even as the heir he had never touched the King unbidden.

He felt his father tremble as he returned the hug.

Yes, it was better that he left.

The King gave the Trader more gold—all the gold his servants could mine in the moon before they left. It seemed strange to Narmer that the gold went to the Trader, not to him. But he was no longer Prince of Thinis, and the Trader was his master now. It was something that would take a while to get used to.

The King gave them provisions too: dried meat and fruit, parched grain, travel bread baked in the oven till it was hard. He would have given them more, but the porters could only carry so much.

Seknut fussed over Narmer to distract herself from her grief, weaving him a new kilt and ordering him new sandals,
as though the best clothes she could find would protect him from the demons of the outside world.

The night before they left, the King held a feast as splendid as the one for Hawk and Berenib’s wedding.

It was hard to feel the people’s eyes on him, gazing at his scars, his crippled leg. It was hard to hear their farewells.

‘You will always be our Golden One,’ cried Rintup the rope maker. There were tears in the man’s eyes.

No, thought Narmer. You are mourning the loss of the boy I used to be, not the one I am now. The Golden One has vanished.

And in his place…who knows?

It was hard to watch Berenib, who was as beautiful as he’d expected, trying not to look at his scarred face. It was even harder for Narmer to see his brother, with gold ornaments on his neck and arms and forehead, sitting on the stool that had been his, at the King’s side. But it only strengthened his resolve to go.

That night in bed he was dozing, too keyed up to sleep properly, when a shadow crept into his room.

For a moment he thought it might be Hawk, come to finish him off. He froze, pretending to sleep. But then he realised it was his father.

The King sat on the chair by Narmer’s bed. He didn’t attempt to wake his son, but simply sat there in the darkness. And Narmer found he too was content simply to lie there, breathing evenly, watching his father in return from under his lashes.

What could they have talked about if he had shown he was awake? What words would bridge their loss—the loss of a kingdom, the loss
of a father, the loss of a son? Both knew they would probably never see each other again.

So both stayed silent in the darkness. Narmer dozed. Perhaps the King did too. And before the dawn the King slipped away.

The Trader’s party left in the predawn light, with only the King and Seknut to farewell them. They were under way before anyone in the town but the bakers was stirring, lighting the fires for the day’s bread, or the occasional woman with a fretful, wakeful child, looking out her windows as they passed.

Bast was nowhere to be seen. But Nitho had assured him that the cat would be waiting for them beyond the town. Cats were good, she said, at ‘following in front’.

They were heading for a city called Punt, according to Nitho, to spend the gold from Thinis on more myrrh. Then they’d take the myrrh to Ka’naan to trade it for copper, then take the copper to Sumer to trade for yet more gold.

This, it seemed, was how traders made their living.

The porters carried the spears and tents, the water bags, and the deerskin bags of parched grain and dates, dried meat, figs and raisins, travel bread and lotus seeds, chattering away in their own strange tongue. Neither the Trader nor Nitho carried more than a small pack, and an even smaller water bag.

Two of the porters also carried Narmer’s litter, a chair fastened to two tent poles. He was glad there were so few people around to see him carried like a baby through the streets where he had once run while the people smiled and bowed. The jiggling movement of the litter hurt his leg and made him feel a bit sick, like being in a fishing boat on the River. But he welcomed the pain. Anything to stop the deeper pain of thinking about what he was leaving behind.

They passed through the streets of the town, with their familiar smells of human dung and baking bread, then out onto the road through the fields. The flood had subsided, leaving rich black mud that was already turning to dust. The first shoots of wheat and barley had poked through the soil now. Soon the gardeners would carry buckets of water on yokes over their shoulders for the vegetables and the fruit trees. Fishermen would take their boats out onto the River; women would wash their clothes in its shallows; and children would drive flocks of geese or goats out to graze, or wave fans in the orchards to scare away the birds.

But he would see none of it.

I will not cry! he told himself desperately. He held himself upright on his chair, his face frozen to stop the tears that tried to fall. I won’t look back, I won’t!

But he did. He saw the River flashing silver, the early smoke rising from the town. Thinis had never looked so beautiful.

This land had been his life. All he had ever hoped for or imagined was here.

Now he would never see Thinis again.

Houses gave way to plots of grain and orchards. And then the rich moist floodlands were behind them. They climbed into the hills, dry and hot as the baker’s oven.

They stopped at midday at a water seep: a thin film of surprisingly cool water that dripped from a rock into a pool no bigger than a cupped hand.

Bast headed to the water and began to drink, then pounched on a lizard that had been unwise enough to try to drink there too. The porters put Narmer’s chair down in the shade of a rock, then went to replenish their water bags.

Narmer leant against the cool stone and closed his eyes. He felt exhausted already. Even though he had been sitting up this past moon, even trying a few cautious steps, it was far more tiring to brace his body against the jiggling of the litter for hours at a time.

This would be his life now, he thought dismally. Hobbling to his litter, leaning on someone’s shoulder. Crippled forever…

‘Hungry?’ Nitho squatted beside him, holding out a handful of dates. She had left off her scarf as soon as they were beyond Thinis, but she still wore the headdress. The Trader had insisted that Narmer wear one too. He was grateful now. The cloth at least kept off the worst of the sun.

Narmer shook his head. ‘No, thank you.’

Nitho no longer called him Prince, he realised. He supposed no one ever would again.

‘You’d better drink something, at least.’ This time she held out a damp water bag.

Narmer drank from it. The water tasted of goatskin. He’d have liked to spill some of the cool water over his head, but water was precious now. Was this still River water? he wondered. Or had Nitho filled it from the pool? The River had given him everything he was—his food, his kingdom, his life’s blood. Now he would never drink its waters again.

The Trader got up and barked out an order. The porters gathered their spears and began to pick up the baggage. Narmer struggled to his feet and started hobbling towards his chair.

‘No,’ the Trader said to him.

Narmer stared. Had he misunderstood? Nitho had been teaching him the Trader’s language, but he still had a lot to learn.

The Trader’s face showed no expression. ‘You will walk,’ he said firmly. ‘Not ride.’

‘But—but I can’t!’ He turned to Nitho, pleading, ‘Nitho, tell him! Explain to him!’

Nitho’s face was impassive too. ‘He is your master now,’ she said quietly. ‘If he says walk, you walk.’

‘But there’s no way I can keep up with you!’

Had the Trader really been serious when he’d said they’d leave him in the desert? Narmer tried to calculate. Thinis was still only a morning’s walk away. Surely he could make it back again! Limping, dusty, bedraggled, crawling perhaps…

He would rather die, and have the crows pick out his eyes.

‘Walk,’ said the Trader again. He held out a walking stick. The dark eyes were kind, but the wrinkled face inscrutable.

Narmer took the stick and began to hobble forward.

It was agony. His good leg took half his weight, the stick the other half. His bad leg refused to move by itself. He had to swing his body every time he took a step, so it would force his leg to swing too.

Step, swing, step, swing, step—it was as though fire played along his muscles. Step, step, step…

The sand burnt his feet. They had lost their toughness during the months in bed. But sandals were too cumbersome for walking far.

The others were getting further and further ahead. Narmer forced himself to go faster, his bare feet pushing frantically through the sand.

Step, swing, step, swing, step…

And slowly he realised that the agony had eased, just a little. That each time he swung his leg it moved a little more easily. That yes, he was finally walking…

Step, swing, step, swing, step, swing…

Sweat poured down his face. He didn’t dare look at the others now to see how far ahead they were. It didn’t matter, he thought grimly. If necessary he’d walk all night to catch up to them. Anything rather than return home a failure. Step, swing, step, swing…

‘Narmer! Narmer!’

For a moment he hardly heard the words. Then the mist cleared before his eyes and he saw Nitho in front of him. She was holding out a water bag. The porters stood beside her with his chair.

‘You did well,’ she said gently. ‘But that’s enough. Drink now, then ride. You can walk again tomorrow.’

‘I walked! I really walked!’

‘Of course you did.’ Her crooked smile was as wide as the River. ‘The crocodile couldn’t stop you, and neither will your leg. You can do anything you put your mind to, Narmer. Anything at all.’

And for a moment, there on the chair, with his leg shaking uncontrollably and triumph in his heart, he believed her. And it felt better than all the cheers and flattery in Thinis.