Young Warriors (8 page)

Mostly she distributed weapons and equipped the horses, but she kept clear of the elephants because her constant companion, Naga, spooked them into near frenzy. Most of the horses shied from the lion as well, but finally Tari found a fiery gray stallion that seemed to feel himself the lion's equal, taking Naga's presence in his stride. Tari chose him as her mount.

At last came the cold dawn she'd been yearning for and dreading. The sun god had not yet risen above the eastern desert when the forces of Kush began assembling in battle formation. The feeling in her stomach was as cold as the morning air, but Tari let that cold rise to freeze her face into a mask of fierce joy. She resolved that if she had to die, she'd do so in a way to make Apedemek proud.

As she scanned the assembled troops, her own feeling of pride blossomed. The shields and armor of the Kushites were mostly leather, not the pounded metal of the Roman armor that gleamed on the soldiers in and around the fort below. But her people were fighting for their land, not for the greed of some emperor who lived across the sea.

Again she hefted her iron-tipped spear and tightened the scabbard that held her sword of finest steel specially made for royal warriors. Nervously she reached over her shoulder and checked the feathered arrows in her quiver. Then she smiled at Netak, mounted at her side. In that moment, the flame of excitement and even courage felt real.

The battle plan had been explained to her, but when the charge came, she quickly lost all sight of plan and order. Elephants, chariots, horses, and foot soldiers surged around her. At first the Romans seemed to move with impunity behind their shields, as if they were large, scaled monsters. But in places their formations broke, and yelling Kushite warriors poured through. Everything soon became screaming, bloodsplattered chaos.

When her spear first found a Roman victim, Tari felt the shock go through her, almost as if she were that soldier. But she raised her shaking voice and cried “For Kinidad!”

Her second Roman, a foot soldier, she brought down with her sword when he tried to slit open her horse's belly, and over him she screamed “For Apedemek!” Over the third, a mounted warrior who fell to her arrow, she called “For Kush!” These cries, taken up around her, mingled with shouts of anger and pain, with the screams of horses and the bellowing of elephants. Cries of terror rose too as enemies fell to the claws of the lion battling at her side.

Tari lost awareness of everything but the fever of battle and the bloody hacking rhythm of her sword. Time had no meaning and the battle had no form, but gradually it seemed they must be winning. The forces of Kush nearly surrounded the fort, and some seemed to have breached a wall.

Then, subtly, something changed, the way a fine day suddenly feels ominous with an approaching storm. At first she couldn't tell where the change had come from. Then she saw it. Over the edge of the desert flowed a fresh flood of Romans. Petronius and his reinforcements had been closer than reported.

The newcomers more than doubled the Roman troops and soon had the forces of Kush pinned between them and the river. The Kushites' once victorious advance became a rout as they hacked and scrambled, trying desperately to live long enough to retreat. As the sun finally dropped into the west, only a ragged remnant of Kush's grand army straggled back to their desert camp.

Tari was numbly surprised to find herself among them. Not daring to think beyond the present moment, she tended to a shallow spear-gash along Naga's side, then applied healing ointment to the sword wound on Netak's shoulder. The queen, she was relieved to hear, had survived as well. Most of the blood on herself, she found, was not her own.

That night the fires burning in Kush's camp were vastly outnumbered, not only by the myriad desert stars but also by the Roman campfires on the riverbank below. Being the heir and now a proven warrior, Tari attended the council of the queen and the Kushite commanders, though at first her main struggle was not to slide into an exhausted sleep.

“What saved us today,” General Harsiotef was saying when Tari quietly joined the council, “was mostly the setting sun. If we engage the Romans tomorrow, we shall be destroyed as surely as a windstorm destroys a grass hut.”

“But surely we cannot give up now,” another general protested. “Kush has never assembled such a massive army.”

“And we have never met such an army either—incredibly well armed, well disciplined, and well trained. It's clear how the Romans have conquered most of the world. You saw what their catapults did to our war elephants, and how their metal shields compared to our cowhide ones.”

“Are you suggesting that we admit defeat?” an angry voice said, and Tari suddenly realized it was her own.

“I'm suggesting, Princess, that we admit reality. Tomorrow Petronius will ask to parley, because he'd rather negotiate a surrender from us now than needlessly lose any more men. And we could kill more of them if we chose to fight, but how many of us would survive if we did?”

The queen raised her voice now from where she sat silhouetted by the fire. “If we treat with the Romans from this position of weakness, there is little good we can hope to gain from any treaty. They will demand whatever they want and leave us only those lands they deem too much trouble to hold.”

“So what, then, are you suggesting, Your Majesty?” General Harsiotef asked deferentially.

“I am suggesting we pray that the gods show us how to make all of our lands more trouble than they are worth to Rome. But if they do not do so before tomorrow's negotiations, then I suggest we agree to what we must and prepare for years more of slow, painful war.”

The council broke up shortly afterward, no one happy with the queen's decision but no one offering a better one. Tari and Naga retreated to the rope-strung wooden cot set up for her under a spindly thorn tree. But she could not sleep. She had proved herself today a worthy warrior of Apedemek's, but what good had it done? She was priestess of the god of war, yet not only was the war lost, so too, it seemed, was the peace.The greedy Romans and their aloof, arrogant gods would swagger over their land, treating a civilization thousands of years old as if Kushites were uncouth barbarians.

What kind of warrior priestess was she if she let that happen unchallenged?

Before the idea could become solid enough to seem ridiculous, she slipped from under her blanket; quietly donned her kilt, tunic, and shawl; and, leaving her armor untouched, strapped on her sword. Beside her, Naga, despite the rigors of the day, radiated tense, fierce energy.

The Kushite guards let Tari pass when they recognized her and her companion, and soon the two were slipping like shadows through the day's gruesome battlefield toward the celebrating Roman camp. From her higher ground, Tari scanned the fort's buildings, the surrounding campfires, and the torchlit wharf area. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but she prayed that Apedemek would let her know when she had found it.

It was the river wharf that drew her, and she veered that way. Fewer sentries were posted there than around the fort, and praying for her god's hunting stealth, she managed to evade them. A number of Roman boats were drawn up to the pilings, where crates and bales of supplies had been unloaded onto the dock. But some things were now being loaded onto boats as well. What, she wondered, could those be at an hour when every Roman should have been sleeping or drunkenly celebrating victory? She saw a tall cloaked man overseeing the loading, a man as pale and hawk-nosed as most Romans. She recognized him as the man Netak had pointed out to her— the hated Roman prefect governor, Petronius. Clearly he was taking great pains to ship some things away before tomorrow, when negotiating Kushites might see them.

Then torchlight gleamed off a patch of bronze where a bundle's wrapping gaped open, and Tari knew.

The statues. These were the statues of Roman gods and emperors that the Kushites had captured in last year's victories, the ones taken to the great temple as divine offerings. The statues Kinidad had died defending. Petronius was trying to spirit them away before the fact that the Romans were stealing them back could inflame the Kushites. But in that he would fail.

Tari crouched as low and tense as a hunting lion. Slowly she and Naga inched forward. Petronius, it was said, spoke Egyptian, and as an educated Kushite she did as well. But now he spoke to the workmen in his own barbarous language. Tari didn't need a translator to understand his orders to unwrap the statue and redo the bundle.

In the torchlight, Tari saw the life-sized statue of a man. These pathetic Romans, she'd been told, had mere human forms for gods, unlike Egyptians and Kushites, whose gods shared the power of animals. This creature was a weakling compared to her own lion-headed warrior god, Apedemek.

Tari smiled, and before the workmen could move, she leaped among them. With a fierce swing of her steel sword, she sliced off the statue's hollow head. It bounced nearly to the feet of the astonished Petronius. Tari lunged for it, wrapped it in her shawl, and fled into the night.

Yelling erupted behind her, and a startled horse whinnied somewhere ahead. Tari swerved that way, hacked at a surprised guard, and, wrenching the horse's tether from a picket, leaped onto its bare back. The animal bolted off, spurred on as much by fear of the lion running beside it as by the rider's urging.

Soon Tari heard mounted pursuit. She first thought to take her trophy back to camp, but she couldn't bring angry mounted Romans down on her sleeping people. Instead, she directed her mount into the desert.

The waning half-moon had risen in the east, and in the clear, dry air its light washed the rocks and gravelly ground with liquid silver. She looked over her shoulder. Three mounted figures pursued her. Laughing joyfully, she knew she didn't care. This was her land—the desert, the abode of lions, the realm of Apedemek. She felt his closeness as she never had before. He would guide her in life and in death.

The chase wore on until Tari noticed there was only one rider behind her. Had the others fallen, or had they gone back for reinforcements? She didn't care, but rode on and on until the clouds mounded along the eastern horizon blushed with dawn. Then, as the sun god reared above the cloud bank, her horse, blinded or exhausted, stumbled and sent her rolling over the gravel to the base of a bare rock outcrop. She staggered up and limped toward the horse, but it shied and trotted off. A gust of wind whipped sand into the air as the lone rider bore down on her.

In the gold light of an oddly clouded dawn, she saw his face. Petronius.

Wearily he dismounted and, sword drawn, walked toward her. “The head,” he rasped in Egyptian. “Give me the head of the divine Emperor Augustus. You have desecrated a god!”

“This is a god?” Tari laughed. “Our gods are not so easily humbled. This is their land; they draw strength from it and will not let you claim it no matter how many hollow statues you set up.”

Petronius halted at the sound of her voice. “A girl?”

Clutching the bronze head, Tari backed toward the rocks. “A princess, sister of the man you killed, heir of Kush and priestess of Apedemek.”

The man laughed. “Woman warriors—one weapon Rome does not have. But holding you should help our bargaining position.”

Trying to keep her voice steady, Tari continued to back away. “Any treaty you make will fail if you try to hold land that is ours. Your empire is a bloated monster. Kush is one bite too many.”

Petronius ran a tired hand over his face. “True, in time every empire finds limits. But I am to fight for mine until they are reached. We have not found them here.”

He stepped forward, but halted at the sound of a low growl. On the rocks above Tari stood a massive lion. Advancing clouds had dimmed the light, but Tari cast a grateful glance at what she thought was Naga, then realized that her lion was beside her. The huge lion on the rocks growled so deeply that the ground seemed to shake. Other lions appeared, striding from behind rocks or out of the cloud-darkened desert.

In the ghastly light, Petronius suddenly looked as pale as sand. Tari, dark and confident in contrast, drew her own sword and advanced.

“Go back, Roman. This is not your land. Draw your empire's line where your pathetic gods can hold it, and leave us be.”

The Roman stepped back a pace; then, glancing over his shoulder, he stopped and smiled in relief. “Brave words, Princess, but more Roman soldiers are nearly here, and not even your storm clouds or unnerving beasts can turn us back.”

That was when the storm hit. A massive desert sandstorm crashed down, choking the air with blinding sand, windblown sand that cut through skin and clothes like merciless arrows. Tari crouched back among the rocks. She heard nothing but shrieking, the shrieking wind and human shrieks beneath it. She saw nothing but dark shapes moving in the roiling air. Shapes of lions, perhaps, or perhaps the looming shape of a man, a man with a lion's head, wielding two vengeful swords.

Three days later, representatives of Rome—their forces newly depleted, it was said, by a freak sandstorm and an attack of wild beasts—met with the queen, the heir, and the counselors of Kush. The foundations of a treaty were laid down. Rome would extend its empire only to the ancient border of Egypt. Territory to the south would remain the lands of Kush.

When, months later in Rome, the Emperor Augustus questioned his general on the treaty's lenient provisions, Petronius was reported to have rubbed the healing claw marks on his cheek and answered, “When the gods tell men their limits, a wise man listens.”

Tari returned to Meroe. In time she ruled it long and well, with Netak as king by her side. But before that, when still a young warrior and priestess, she buried the bronze head of the Roman emperor at the threshold of the temple of Apedemek. It lay there for millennia, an offering of thanks and a promise to the protector of her land.

PAMELA F. SERVICE