The Horus Road (17 page)

The navy did not arrive until the end of the following month, and Ahmose spent the time until then in making sure that the irrigation canals into the city could not be opened. The mighty ditches around the mounds slowly filled with the life-giving water the citizens of Het-Uart so desperately needed and which Ahmose was determined to deny them. He stationed contingents of men protected by Medjay archers at every point along the walls where corrugations showed old breaches.

At first men could be heard digging on the city side, loosening the stone-like mud, but where they broke through they were faced with a hail of well-placed arrows through the new apertures and soldiers who stood ready to struggle against the tug of the higher water in the ditches as it tried to flow into the lower canals and who quickly stopped its passage with boulders and earth. Ahmose knew that Apepa would order the digging of more wells and that water would be struck without much trouble, but he also knew that no matter how many wells were sunk the supply would never be enough.

Space inside Het-Uart was distressingly limited. The city was a tightly packed warren of narrow streets and rows of tiny houses. Where was there room for delving, if the inhabitants were being forced to bury their dead, and even their pack animals, under their floors? And suppose enough water was found for drinking if the populace lined up to collect it? The docks were gone and the city surrounded by Egyptian troops. The rich fertility of the Delta was now denied to the people. No goods would be unloaded. No fruits of any harvest would find their way inside to fill hungry bellies. In the past hostilities were broken off during the Inundation and resumed in the summer when the Nile had returned to its normal level and the crops had been sown. That was tradition. But Ahmose, alert to any changes in the quality of sounds emanating from Het-Uart and hearing them become gradually more subdued, reflected that such a tradition was gravely flawed. He had rejected it and in doing so he knew in his bones that Het-Uart would fall.

The navy’s arrival completed the city’s blockade. High water and ships surrounded it. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the narrow perimeter between its walls and the flood and kept watch over its stubbornly closed gates. The northern mound where the bulk of the Setiu army was quartered was faring no better. In the eastern Delta the fighting went on, but news from his divisions there was encouraging. The Horus Road was at last being held, although his troops were spread too thinly to attempt a recovery of the forts that constituted the Wall of Princes. That will come later, Ahmose thought on a tide of elation. For the first time since my father refused to bow to Apepa’s insulting demand to slay the hippopotamuses in the Weset marshes, I can smell victory, and the odour is very sweet.

The memory of the hippopotamuses made him think of Tani. He had wondered, as winter dragged on, whether there would be a communication from her or from Apepa at last, if not a declaration of surrender then perhaps a plea for clemency on behalf of the citizens, a request for a meeting. But the palace within Het-Uart was dumb, either from misery or from stubbornness, and as day followed uneventful day its very silence prompted Ahmose’s recollections to multiply.

He began to share them with Ramose in the long nights when nothing but the calling of the heralds and the sighing of the city disturbed the dark hours. The two men would sit in the glow of Ahmose’s lamps, wine in their hands, and speak of Tani and Kamose and the agony of the years behind them. It was a cleansing of a kind, a release for Ramose, and for Ahmose a time when he could forget that a God-King may not draw too near to another human being. He was a Prince again, with friends to fish and wrestle with, a sister to love and protect, a brother who both baffled him and inspired his admiration.

“It is as though Tani has been turned to stone behind those walls,” Ramose remarked one night. “For weeks I have half-expected some message from her to be tossed down to us, even if it was just an appeal for water or food. She must know that we are here. She could mount the walls and shout down to us if she wanted.” He swirled the wine dregs slowly in his cup. “I suppose that she may be dead or ill but I do not think so. I fancy I would feel such things in my soul if they were so.” He glanced at Ahmose warily but Ahmose did not laugh at him. “There is a wailing from the city tonight,” he went on. “Did you hear it earlier, Ahmose?”

“Yes, I did,” Ahmose replied gravely. “It is possible that disease has broken out. If that is so, then we may indeed receive a message from Apepa. But I do not believe he will make it that easy for us.” He sat forward. “I judge that he has been commanded by his fellow Princes in Rethennu to hold out against us at any cost. They know that if Het-Uart falls, they will never be able to gain a foothold in Egypt again. All its wealth will be lost to them. Gold, grain, papyrus, everything. They are spending their own armies in this conflict with alarming abandon. They expect nothing less from their brother here.” There was a silence during which he sipped his wine, pursed his lips, and set his cup back carefully on the table. I am a little drunk, he thought with surprise. But it is good, this slight removal from myself.

“And you expect nothing less from your divisions,” Ramose countered. “But you will have to send some of your men home to the sowing when Mekhir comes, Ahmose. There is grumbling already in the ranks.”

“I know.” Ahmose said tersely. “I intend to. And I long to go home myself, Ramose. I dream that I am already there, but the garden is dim and the outline of the house is hazy and although I can hear Aahmes-nefertari’s voice calling to me I cannot see her in the mist. I want this war of reclamation to be over.” He spoke with a sudden and uncharacteristic bitterness and Ramose glanced at him, startled by the intensity of his words.

“You have done more towards seeing that goal accomplished than your brother ever could,” he said simply. Ahmose did not reply. The lamp was guttering, and as he reached out to snuff it, the flame died of its own accord.

Khoiak began with a light sprinkling of rain, not unknown in the Delta, and a sky cluttered with streamers of long, grey-tinged clouds driven by a brisk wind. The Medjay took shelter where they could, shaking the drops of moisture from their hair and crouching disgruntled together like flocks of bedraggled birds, but the Egyptians stood with faces raised and eyes closed, enjoying the unexpected drizzle. Afterwards the ground steamed. Hungry mosquitoes joined the phalanx of flies already tormenting naked skin in the rising humidity. The flood was at its highest, turning Egypt into a vast, placid lake beneath which new silt was settling onto the used-up soil. Het-Uart itself was an island girt about by water and the equally obdurate Egyptian army.

Yet to Ahmose, who had taken to standing on the verge of the swollen tributary and staring at the city when the routine of his daily duties was over, the atmosphere was charged with suspense. It was as though a storm was brewing far out in the desert, the slowly multiplying power of its birth generating the heavy expectancy he felt. Flicking his fly whisk absently he brooded, scarcely aware of the ordered activity constantly going on around him, his eyes travelling Het-Uart’s awesome defences. He was becoming increasingly frustrated, at times even disheartened, by the inertia of his situation but overlying this was a breathless certainty that the impasse was about to be broken. It was in the stultifying air, in the lapping of the flood at his feet, filtering through men’s actions and infusing their voices.

Soon he must begin to rotate his troops, he knew. By the end of the following month the Nile would have regained its banks and the earth would be waiting for the seed. Ankhmahor had already gone home to Aabtu to be present at Osiris’s feasts, leaving his son to command the King’s personal bodyguard. Ahmose wondered if Apepa was possessed by this same strong sense of anticipation. He pondered his enemy’s state of mind, seeing him pacing out the boundary of his citadel, captured by a premonition he did not know they shared.

He was woken one morning just before dawn by a tide of anguish he had not felt since Kamose had ravaged Dashlut. Sitting up in the darkness, his heart fluttering, he was about to call for Akhtoy when a light wavered outside the tent and he heard Ramose’s voice addressing the soldier standing watch. He swung his feet to the carpet and groped for a kilt, but then he stood still sniffing the air around him. It was filled with a sweetish stench that seemed to feed the grief by which he had been roused and he recognized it at once. I have paid it no attention when it has invaded my nostrils during the day, he thought as he wrapped the linen around his waist. But this time it must have begun while I dreamed. Dashlut. I will never forget my first whiff of burning human flesh. Pushing on a pair of sandals, he strode to the tent flap and lifted it cautiously.

His guard saluted and Ramose bowed, his face pale and shadowy. “I can smell it,” Ahmose said. “It is very strong out here. Where is it coming from?”

“From the city,” Ramose answered curtly. “You can see a dull glow even above the walls and when the sun rises I expect a pall of black smoke to be visible. They are burning bodies.” Ahmose took his arm and together they walked to where the tributary lay motionless, its surface glassy black, and turned towards Het-Uart. The walls bulked dark against a slightly lightened sky, but the stars usually visible above them were eclipsed by a sullen orange rim. Ahmose shivered. The ground struck cold through his thin reed sandals and the pre-dawn air was chill.

For some time the two men watched. Then Ahmose said, “What do you think is happening, Ramose?”

“I think that people are dying,” Ramose replied. “It is inevitable that a scarcity of water has resulted in the birth of disease, particularly in a place like this. Also there is no fresh food other than the handfuls of grain the citizens can grow on the rooftops. The poor, the farmers and traders visiting Het-Uart who became trapped inside when the siege began, the children, these will die first. Apepa’s stockpiles are limited by space. They are becoming depleted. He and his nobles will not be suffering, but I pity the inhabitants with no resources at all.”

“They would have done better to fling the bodies over the wall for us to deal with,” a deep voice cut in, and Ahmose turned to find Hor-Aha at his elbow with Paheri and Kay Abana behind. “Thus they would have saved precious fuel and reduced the swift spreading of disease. The mayor is not a clever man.”

“Perhaps Apepa does not want us to know the rate of human attrition,” Paheri suggested. “That fire may represent a hundred bodies or a thousand. How they stink!” Oh, Tani, Ahmose thought in despair. How much of the city’s agony are you able to see and hear? Did you lie awake last night with that first rank odour curling into your bedchamber so that you could not sleep? Are you deafened by the cries and wailings that do not drift down to us here? Or are you tightly held in Apepa’s lavish cocoon, in his remorseless arms? Do you speak out to him against this horror or has your heart become too hard?

“Put the navy on full alert today, Paheri,” he said huskily. “And you, Hor-Aha, do not let the Medjay leave their ships. Khabekhnet, are you here?” His Chief Herald detached himself from the shadows and came forward. “Warn General Khety to beware of any archers appearing on the walls of the northern mound. He is to prepare for battle. General Turi and General Sebek-khu must likewise deploy their divisions as though the gates were about to open.”

“Your Majesty expects this?” Kay asked hopefully. “Then I beg Your Majesty’s permission to anchor the
North
across from the gates leading to Apepa’s citadel.” Ahmose was too disturbed to smile.

“Your superiors will decide where the
North
is to be placed,” he said. “As for what I expect, I can only believe that we are seeing the beginning of Apepa’s ruin and therefore we must be ready for anything he might do.” He shrugged. “Surrender is unlikely. Ramose, have my chariot brought round when you are ready.” They reverenced him and scattered, and he walked back to his tent with one hand pressed to his nose. It seemed to him that the smoke from the city had a more pungent reek than that of the burning Setiu soldiers two months before. His imagination was magnifying his sense of smell, that he knew, but he could not control his revulsion.

He, his generals, and all his host waited in a state of battle readiness and tense anticipation while night after night the shifting blush of that macabre fire replaced the dwindling rose of sunset and blotted out the stars. Sometimes it sank to a few intermittent flares but it did not die completely, and its smell permeated hair, clothing and food so that the Egyptians wore, breathed and ate the testimony of death.

Two weeks went by and Khoiak ended. The level of water in the tributary and the canals around the city began to recede. On the first day of Tybi the rest of Egypt, the sane, clean, Ma’at-filled land blessed by the gods, celebrated the Feast of the Coronation of Horus. Ahmose had ceased to think of the Delta as belonging to that privileged country. It was an aberration, a place without a name where he was condemned to live in a continual haze of greyness and try to confront an enemy who would not show his face.

The troops shared his mounting apprehension. Increasingly he saw it in the eyes that turned to him as he was driven among them and heard it in the tones of his officers as they met him each morning to receive their orders. What shall I do if Apepa does nothing? he asked himself in the endless dark hours when sleep was a memory. How long can he withstand the suffering of his people? How stubborn is his will? What shall I do when the tributary shrinks to its summer level and the ditches tothe east of the mounds dry up and I am forced to withdraw the navy?

No answers came to him, no dream in which his father or brother appeared with words of wisdom, no image of Amun holding symbols of victory to be interpreted by a grateful son. He remembered with envy the woman who had dominated Kamose’s thoughts and ultimately stolen his heart with the timely visions that had enabled him to accomplish so much. Was Kamose less intelligent, less astute than I, that you should have favoured him so? he asked the god as he knelt before the shrine in his tent. Or did you value him more highly for his sheer obsessiveness? And yet I am the one you have appointed to be King. Hear me, great Amun. I do not want rewards. I do not even want a vision. Give me this city, this prize for which my brother died. Give it to me and name your price, for I am tired and I have come to a place from which there is no escape save by retreating.