The Age of Ra (7 page)

''Fool.''

None of them stays long. It's a courtesy call, a formality. Ra is the ancient relative they come to see once a day more out of duty than love. They stay a brief while, exchanging pleasantries, managing to mask the divisions between them. They seem ill at ease, however. Perhaps it is the effort of maintaining an illusion of cordiality.

Or perhaps, Ra thinks sombrely, they sense what I sense, that my days are numbered, and it troubles them. Or else, which is worse, it
doesn't
trouble them.

They are soon gone, at any rate. Only Set remains, and that is because he has the second of his daily tasks to fulfil.

Apophis rises once more. The giant serpent, now healed, explodes from the river, and as ever Set leaps to wrestle with it. As ever, he is victorious. Apophis dies again, and for a time the river is all froth and crimson tumult.

And so the voyage is over. The Solar Barque reaches the western gate of heaven and moors there. Ra is by now weighed down with cares. A gloom has well and truly descended on him. He has nothing to look forward to but a night in the netherworld, Mandet drifting along a black river through caverns of utter darkness, the air glacially still, and only Aker for company, a stoic, uncommunicative presence, peering intently ahead at all times, his golden eyes like lamps in a tomb. No sleep, no rest, just a period of deathlike isolation, to counterbalance the brightness and gregariousness of day.

Ra steps off Mesektet and onto Mandet, heavily.

Dusk, as always, brings sorrow.

6. Caravan

T
he camels spat and grumbled, and the children laughed harshly and thrashed them all the harder with their switches. In a long line the beasts of burden picked their way across the desert, with a straggle of goats bleating behind. Their young drivers showed them little mercy.

Occasionally, during a rest stop, one of the fouler-tempered camels might take its revenge and bite. The children seemed to find this funny too. The bitten boy - it was always a boy - would giggle, rub the spot where the camel had sunk its teeth in, then turn on the offending animal and thrash it soundly. It was as if pain, giving it and receiving it, was all a game to them.

The adults of the Bedouin
goum
were no less hardy. They thought nothing of sitting ten, twelve hours in the saddle, remaining perfectly upright despite the swaying, arrhythmic lurch of the camels' motion. Their faces were imperturbable, their skin as finely folded as parchment maps, their eyes full of distance. During travel only the men spoke, and when they did, which was not often, it was to bark an order at the children or make some dusty, sardonic comment to which only the other men were expected to respond.

The women never spoke. At least, not in David's presence, although at night he heard voices coming from their tents and the sound was soft and tinkling, as refreshing as a drink of cool spring water.

This family tribe of Bedouin weren't just nomads, they were also merchants. Three of the camels did not carry people but had strongboxes hanging from their sides, two apiece. Whatever was inside the padlocked steel containers, which were stamped with hieroglyphs, was heavy and clinked metallically. These camels were the first to be unloaded each evening, and the strongboxes were kept overnight in a special tent guarded by men with rifles.

Jewellery? Weapons? Gold coins? Valuable merchandise of some sort, to be traded at the caravan's final destination.

David himself was valuable merchandise too. The ropes binding him told him this, as did the fact that he was never left on his own for a moment. When he needed to relieve himself he was always escorted by at least one armed guard, usually two, and when he was up in the saddle his wrists were secured tightly to the pommel so that he couldn't slide off even by accident. He was fed and he was given water, just enough to hold body and
ka
together, and he knew that the Bedouin wouldn't be keeping him alive if they didn't feel he was worth something to them. It would be a waste of precious provisions otherwise.

His memory was hazy, the recent past a blur, but little by little he pieced together what had happened.

The
ba
lance had slipped from his grasp at the crucial moment and the shot had gone astray. There had been a victim, but it was not him. Blood had been shed, but not his. The Bedouin caravan had been approaching just as he made his suicide attempt. He had been too preoccupied to hear, and he had, by some drastic fluke, killed not himself but the caravan's lead camel.

The sheikh of the tribe had finally managed, after several attempts, to explain this sorry mishap to him. David knew a smattering of Arabic, but these Bedouin used an unfamiliar dialect, one which had cross-pollinated with some glottal sub-Saharan language. With gesture and dumbshow the sheikh showed him a camel keeling over, and brandished the spent lance to make the point that this was the murder weapon.

So David had deprived them of a camel, and to make up for it they were going to have to sell him somehow. They seemed to have a buyer in mind.

''Osiris!'' The sheikh indicated the embroidered emblem which made up part of David's battledress, a pair of phoenix wings enfolding his chest in a feathery embrace. Then the sheikh waved an arm in a southerly direction. ''Nephthys! Khartoum!''

David pondered escape. How to do it? He was never alone, never untied, watched at all times by his captors (although ''owners'' might be a more accurate description). Opportunities to make a bid for freedom seemed few and far between.

Then there was the desert. It was a kind of open-plan jail. Even if he managed to get away from the merchants, perhaps by making a desperate dash while someone's back was turned, he would only end up lost in the wilderness again. It had nearly destroyed him the last time. It would definitely do so this time.

Grabbing a gun, taking a hostage, demanding to be released?

Same problem. Where would he go?

Only one possible solution offered itself.

Steal a camel.

At night he shared a tent with six other men and four boys. It was a thing of rugs and striped blankets, cosy in its way, like a woven-walled room. David's designated sleeping space was right in the middle, and he had to lie there and make himself as comfortable as he could with his wrists tethered to one of the central upright poles, which was embedded in the ground between two of the rugs.

The smell inside the tent was noisome. One of the men did nothing but fart all night long, and all of them, including David, reeked of sweat and bad feet. The noise was pretty noisome too, since there seemed to be a competition going on to see who could snore the loudest. If predators were roaming out there in the dark, it wasn't the light of the camel-dung campfire that would keep them at bay, it was the raucous massed snoring of the people.

It was horribly reminiscent of a boarding school dormitory. There was even buggery. Almost every night, during the small hours, David would be woken up by the sound of a certain man forcing himself on one of the boys. He would have to listen to several minutes of furtive grunting and groaning, followed by a slap which was presumably intended to remind the unwilling participant to keep quiet about what had been done to him. The boy would then, often as not, cry himself to sleep.

David knew who the rapist was. The man slept in the far right-hand corner of the tent and was a sort of semi-detached uncle, high up in the tribal hierarchy and a close confidant of the sheikh. In other words, too important to be called to account for his misdeeds, even if someone in the
goum
were to pluck up the nerve to denounce him. He had a twisted nose and a lush moustache and had somehow contrived to lose teeth in a diagonally alternating pattern, so that his smile resembled two rows of a chessboard. David would happily knock out all of the other teeth if the chance ever came.

But escape was his priority and he could let nothing interfere with that. Having settled on a plan, he bided his time, waiting till a moonless night came. By now he had recovered from his ordeal in Southern Arabia and regained much of his strength. The caravan had turned due south, and if Khartoum was where they were headed then that put them firmly in Freegypt, between the Nile and the Red Sea. This was the time to get away, before they crossed the border into the Sudan and were back on Nephthysian soil.

His hands were tied back to back, preventing him from reaching the knots with his fingers. There was nothing to stop him, though, from gnawing at them with his teeth.

It was a painstaking process, and at one point a pains-giving process, when a tooth that had been loosened during his beating by the Nephthysians, an upper molar, suddenly fell out. There was a tearing sensation in his gum, and what felt like a jolt of electricity went shooting up through his jaw into his sinuses. He stifled a scream. Blood filled his mouth, and he spat and spat until the wound sealed itself.

Then, in a somewhat more gingerly fashion, he resumed gnawing.

Around him the nocturnal cacophony of farts and snores continued. He froze as a man shouted out something. He'd been spotted. The game was up.

But the shout subsided to a murmur, then a smacking of the lips, a snuffle, then the man was snoring again.

Finally, the knots came loose.

He was free.

Well, almost.

He got up and tiptoed over slumbering bodies that he could barely see in the dark. He trod on someone's hand and expected a yelp of protest, but it was one of the boys and they slept more deeply than the men and were accustomed to physical abuse besides. The boy mumbled, David shushed him, and the boy rolled over and went back to sleep.

He reached the tent flap and eased himself through.

Firelight flickered, revealing all seven of the
goum
's tents arranged in a semicircle. The goats were clustered at the mouth of the semicircle, and beyond them were the camels, lying with their legs folded under them, spectrally pale, like mountains on a horizon.

To David's left lay the tent where the valuable merchandise was stored. The men on guard looked drowsy. Their rifles drooped towards the earth.

He couldn't risk sneaking past them, however. He would have to circumnavigate the camp and come at the camels from the far side.

He crept away from the campfire, out into the indigo dark. The terrain the caravan was crossing had changed recently. The landscape was no longer rocks and hard-packed earth, but sand, nothing but sand. Scooped, ribbed, undulating, supple sand, mile upon mile of it, wave upon wave. Sand that got everywhere: in your socks, in your hair, up your nose. David had even found grains of it under his foreskin.

Keeping the tents to his right he went in a broad semicircle, slithery-footed on the dune slopes. Finally he began his approach on the camels. He had already singled out the one he was going to take: an elderly male, so beaten and worn down that there was no more obstinacy left in it. This docile creature would, he reckoned, accept an inexperienced rider at the reins and not try to throw him off at the first opportunity.