by Wilbur Smith
Only then did I realize I was being manipulated by an alien influence. I had run into a psychic barrier. I felt myself swaying on my feet and my legs were growing numb and heavy under me. My mind was clouding. I could not think clearly. I could not go any further.
Then I felt a light pressure on my shoulder and I heard Inana’s sweet voice in my ear: ‘Fight it, Taita! You know what it is. You can overcome it.’
I took a deep breath that whistled in my throat and chest and I listened to her voice. I felt the dark cloud that was inundating my mind begin to lighten and abate. My legs firmed under me. I forced them to take another step.
‘Yes, Taita. You have the power to overcome it. Be strong for yourself and for those you love. They need you now.’
I took another step, and then another. The thorns brushed my face, but I knew intuitively that Inana was turning the points so they would not bite into my skin.
Then suddenly the thorns no longer brushed my face and I could see light behind my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes and I saw a wondrous landscape laid out before me. The dense hedge of fierce thorn bushes had gone. Before my eyes was laid out a garden of delights. There were limpid lakes and waterfalls that glittered in the sunlight. There were forests of lovely trees, green and luxurious. Their high branches were picked out with vivid flowers that shone like rubies and sapphires. Under them were spread carpets of green velvet lawns.
From the forest across the lake emerged a herd of the beautiful sable unicorns that I had last seen drawing Terramesh’s chariot with the devastating blade-edged wheels. Now they were running free, no longer in harness. They frolicked like colts as they cantered down to the edge of the lake to drink of the waters. When they had taken their fill they trotted back to the edge of the forest and disappeared amongst the trees
‘This is the hidden garden of Terramesh,’ I said with certainty as my wits were restored to me in their entirety. The bird on my shoulder chirruped her agreement, and I felt a stab of concern. ‘But where is Terramesh now?’
‘He is sleeping.’
‘Are you certain of that, Inana?’
‘Don’t be afraid. You are safe now with me.’
‘I am not afraid,’ I corrected her with dignity. ‘I was mildly concerned, and that is all.’ Then I moved on to more pressing matters. ‘How are we going to manipulate Terramesh into a position where Rameses is able get a clean shot at the undamaged side of his face?’
And so we discussed this problem in detail. Inana forsook her avian manifestation and reverted to her human form in order to make her explanation more abundantly clear. She pointed out the area of the garden which she had chosen as the killing ground. Then she explained how she intended to manipulate our victim to enter it, and where Rameses, Serrena and I must take up our positions to await Terramesh’s arrival.
‘He has never previously laid eyes on Serrena. He will believe that she is a surreal manifestation, a spirit provided for his pleasure by his mother or one of the other dark gods who favour him. They have done this for him countless times before. He will be expecting it and be completely off his guard.’ Inana turned and pointed out a single magnificent tree that grew in the middle of the lawns. ‘The centre of that sycamore tree trunk is hollow. You and Rameses will use it as a hide. When Serrena has manoeuvred the quarry into the correct position at precisely the agreed range Rameses will hail him with the challenge. Then when he turns Rameses will do the rest.’ She looked at me with those astonishingly lovely eyes. ‘Is there anything that I have not made quite clear?’
‘Yes, there is. How am I to get Serrena and Rameses through the thorn fence without them falling asleep on me?’
‘I am sure you will think of something,’ she replied and I heard the echo of laughter in her voice as she mutated from goddess back to pretty little bird. ‘You cannot expect me to assist you. Not in my present manifestation.’
I went back through the thorn hedge and found Rameses and Serrena waiting for me anxiously where I had left them on the far side. ‘Where have you been, Tata?’ they demanded in unison. ‘We were getting very worried.’
‘The only thing you need worry about is that I have to carry each of you through this thorn hedge. Please don’t argue. We are running out of time.’
‘But—’ Rameses protested indignantly.
‘No buts, my darling husband. You heard Tata. You are going first,’ Serrena told him firmly, and he subsided. She was by now indisputably in control as his senior wife.
Rameses wanted to carry his own bow case but I prevailed on him to leave it in Serrena’s care and he reluctantly agreed. Empty-handed he managed to get halfway through the thorn hedge before his legs folded up under him and he subsided in a heap, snoring softly with a happy smile on his face. He was a big man, all muscle and bone, but I managed to drape him over one shoulder and carry him through into the hidden garden. I laid him in the shade of the giant sycamore and left the warbler perched in the foliage above him to keep watch over him.
Then I went back through the hedge to fetch Serrena. She hopped up into my arms without quibble and threw both arms around my neck.
‘I have been looking forward to this,’ she told me happily. After her husband she seemed light as thistledown and I was able to carry the bow case and other luggage in addition to her. When I laid her under the sycamore tree beside Rameses she snuggled up to him without waking either him or herself. I sat and watched them for a minute or two. They were such a perfect couple that I came over all mawkish.
‘This is all very homely and endearing,’ the warbler warbled in the branches above me. ‘Perhaps a lullaby from me would make it perfect.’
Rameses and I had both long ago agreed that sixty-five paces was the ultimate range for the most accurate shooting of his bow. At that distance he had demonstrated that he could hit a target the size of an acorn time after time, without fail. I slapped his cheeks until he woke from his slumbers, and he gazed about him, marvelling at the beauty of the secret garden. His exclamations roused Serrena. Once both of them had become accustomed to their new surroundings I explained the roles that I expected them to play.
I gave Serrena the small bundle of cosmetics and other feminine accoutrements which I had carried along with the bow case, and with which she could enhance her beauty to even greater splendour. We left her to work this feminine witchcraft, while Rameses and I paced out the killing ground together, from the hollow trunk of the sycamore to the wild blue columbine flower that grew in solitary splendour in the centre of the lawn facing the lake.
Inana had assured us that Terramesh was asleep in the forest beyond the lake. Inana, in her manifestation as the red-winged warbler, was perched at the top of the tree under which he lay. She would keep him comatose until Rameses and I were ready to receive him. There was a causeway across the centre of the lake. Inana would influence Terramesh to use it as soon as she roused him from his slumbers.
At long last the trap was baited and set. Rameses and I had taken up our positions within the hollowed-out centre of the sycamore. Rameses nocked the fatal arrow to his bowstring. The metal head of the arrow shone with the peculiar patina of pure gold. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, as if in prayer. Then he opened them again and nodded at me. I stepped into the opening in the trunk of the tree and looked up the wide expanse of the lawn to where Serrena waited inconspicuously under the overhang of the thorn fence which surrounded the secret garden. She was sitting forward eagerly watching for my signal. I waved my free hand above my head, and she stood up and walked gracefully down the lawn to take up her position beside the blue flower. This was ostensibly her signal to me, but more accurately it was my signal to Inana who I knew was watching from the treetop on the far side of the lake.
Serrena wore the silken dress that had been her wedding garment. It shimmered as she moved, showing off the sculpturing of her body in exquisite detail. But the long tresses of her hair caught the sunlight and her features glowed with the cosmetics she had applied m
aking all her surroundings seem drab by comparison.
I tore my eyes off her to turn and look across the lake just as the towering figure of Terramesh stepped out of the encroaching forest on the far side. There he stopped to stretch and yawn cavernously, before he walked out on to the causeway that spanned the waters. He was unarmed, carrying neither sword nor bow. He wore only a brief loin-cloth; thus his extraordinary physique was almost fully exposed. He seemed to be composed entirely of massive bone and bulging muscle, the one not necessarily in harmony with the other. He appeared to be more savage animal than human being.
Only the one side of his head was covered by his metal helmet. The exposed half was deprived entirely of hair, riven and wrought by scars until it resembled a parody of natural flesh and skin. In the centre of this expanse of damaged flesh his lidless eye stared unblinkingly ahead.
He was halfway across the causeway before he became aware of Serrena standing on the lawn above him. He stopped in mid-stride and stared at her fixedly with his single eye.
Serrena returned his gaze just as expressionlessly. Then she lifted both hands to her breast and, beginning with the button beneath her chin, she began unhurriedly to open her bodice to her waist. Then she delicately parted the cloth so her breasts showed in the opening, large, round and creamy, tipped with ruddy nipples. She took one of her nipples between two fingers and pointed it towards Terramesh, manipulating it gently until a drop of clear liquid gleamed on the tip. At the same time she hooded her eyes in flagrant invitation, epitomizing the perfect blending of pulchritude and lust.
Terramesh raised both his hands to the fastenings of his helmet, then lifted it from his head and let it drop. The contrast between one side of his face and the other was startling. The ruin and mutilation of the left side was offset by the stern nobility of the right. And yet the eye was cruel and the line of the mouth unrelenting. He smiled with the undamaged half of his lips but it was without humour or kindness; rather it was a sneer of lust and rapacity.
With both hands he loosed his loin-cloth and discarded it, so that his genitalia were exposed. They dangled flaccid and soft down to his knees. He took his penis in one hand and stroked it back and forth. His fingers barely spanned its girth as it stiffened into rigidity. His foreskin peeled back from his glans, leaving it pink and shining and the size of a ripe apple. It thrust out rigidly ahead of him by the length of his forearm.
Serrena seemed to be goaded on by this display. She shrugged out of her apparel and stood naked with both hands cupped around her mons pubis and her hips thrust forward. She smiled lewdly and it matched his for cupidity. I was startled by this display of wanton lust from her although I realized it was contrived.
Terramesh started forward. He left the causeway across the lake and marched up the slope towards where she stood. He passed close to where Rameses and I were hidden within the hollow of the sycamore, so close that I could hear his grunts of arousal like those of a great wild boar in must and smell it on him like the stench of a virulent pox.
I let him go on twenty paces up the lawn and then I touched Rameses’ shoulder. In unison we stepped out of our hiding place. Rameses took three paces ahead of me to give himself a clear shot, and then he dropped naturally in the archer’s stance with his bow presented and his single arrow nocked. On the greensward above us Terramesh came to a stop a few paces in front of where Serrena stood. He towered above her, almost blotting her out from our line of sight.
At the same moment Rameses called to him in a voice so thunderous that it startled even me who was entirely prepared for it, ‘Son of Phontus, I bring you a message from your father!’
Terramesh spun around to face us. He froze and stared down at us. Then everything seemed to happen at the same instant. Serrena dropped face down into the grass behind him, instantly clearing the range for Rameses’ shot. In a single flowing movement Rameses had lifted his bow and drawn the string back to its fullest extent, then released it with a sharp, almost musical twang of the bowstring.
Terramesh’s reaction seemed instantaneous but was still far too slow to cheat the deadly arrow, which was already halfway to its mark. It reached its zenith and began the drop before he had even twitched. Both his hideous face and his massive penis were pointed to the sky from which the arrow fell like a ray of sunlight. It took him in the precise centre of his staring eyeball, which exploded in a bright spray of aqueous liquid. The shaft protruded half an arm’s length from Terramesh’s eye socket. At that angle and depth it must certainly have transfixed his brain. I expected him to drop instantly and lie where he fell. But instead he started to run and at the same time to scream in a high, penetrating monotone. He came straight at us; at first I thought it was a deliberate attack, yet he gave no indication of seeing us. But when Rameses and I jumped out of his way he kept on straight down the hill towards the lake, blindly screaming his agony and his fury.
We drew our swords and took off in pursuit but neither of us could catch up with him. Then, still screaming, he ran full tilt into the giant sycamore tree, which he manifestly was unable to see. The impact drove the point of the arrow completely through his skull and out of the back of his head. But he kept on his feet and staggered in small circles, still howling. Then the flesh began to fall off his head in strips as though it was rotting. The white bone of his skull gleamed in the sunlight and then it also began to crumble.
Simultaneously the meat of his arms and upper torso blackened and fell off the bone in chunks and tatters. The stench of putrefaction that his body emitted was so overpowering that we covered our mouths and noses and backed away from him as he collapsed. His body continued to writhe and convulse as it turned to pulp and became a shapeless heap of ordure. Even this crumbled into dust and began to blow away on the light wind that swept across the lake. However, the arrowhead that had slain him lay on the spot where he had fallen. Hesitantly Rameses went to it and stooped to pick it up, but before his fingers touched it the metal blackened and eroded into nothingness. Eventually neither sign nor evidence of the previous existence of Terramesh remained.
We stared in astonishment and awe for a while, but finally we turned away and walked back to where Serrena waited for us. We sat down on each side of her. Rameses placed his arm around her shoulders and she leaned against him. Her face beneath the cosmetics was bereft and pale as snow, and her eyes swam with tears.
‘I had to force myself to watch it. It was just too horrible,’ she whispered. Then she pointed back over the spot where he had vanished. ‘See what is happening to Terramesh’s hidden garden.’
Before our eyes the lake and the waterfalls dried up and became nothing more than sordid muddy depressions in the earth, filled with green slime. The trees of the forest dropped their lush vegetation and the blossom that covered them. Their trunks and branches turned black and dry. The grass that grew beneath them withered away. The limbs of the giant sycamore tree fell from the trunk and lay twisted and contorted on the ground below like those of an amputee. The thorn hedge that had enclosed the secret garden reappeared, stark and forbidding, but then almost immediately began to droop and fade away. There remained no vestige of Terramesh’s herd of magnificent black unicorns. They had disappeared with the rest of the secret garden. Nothing remained but decay and devastation. The only exception was Terramesh’s helmet, which lay where he had abandoned it. I went down to retrieve it as a remembrance of these monumental events.
‘There is no reason for us to remain here another minute longer,’ I said as I returned to where they waited. Immediately Rameses helped Serrena to her feet and we set off towards where we had left our skiff hidden on the bank of the River Nile. None of us looked back.
The sun was setting when we reached Hurotas’ camp and a joyous cry went up as the sentries recognized the three of us in the skiff. Some of them plunged into the river to seize our craft and drag it ashore. By the time we had disembarked half the army had gathered to welcome us. Then Hurotas and Tehuti came hurrying from their royal
camp and fell upon Serrena. Hurotas seized her in his arms and carried her into his camp while Tehuti danced around them in a circle chanting her thanks to all the gods for her daughter’s safe return. Rameses and I followed them at a discreet distance, waiting for our turn to have the attention of Hurotas. By fortunate chance we carried with us the sack containing our equipment and Terramesh’s helmet which I had retrieved from where he had abandoned it on the causeway across the lake.
Finally Tehuti took her daughter into her arms and, surrounded by their ladies-in-waiting, they withdrew into the women’s seraglio. Hurotas came to us immediately. ‘Follow me!’ he ordered. ‘I want to know exactly what happened, and particularly I want to know the whereabouts of that ravening monster.’
He led us into his private conference tent and, while we found seats for ourselves, he broached a flagon of red wine and poured the contents into the enormous jugs that he reserved for special occasions: a certain sign of his approval.
‘Now tell me. Tell me everything,’ he commanded as he dropped into his throne facing us.
Rameses looked at me. On the journey back from the secret garden we had discussed how much we should reveal to Hurotas of our encounter with Terramesh. We were worried that so much of what had happened to us was so extraordinary as to be unbelievable to anybody who had not witnessed it for themselves. We had finally agreed not to withhold any details from Hurotas, no matter how far-fetched they seemed to be. If he baulked at the veracity of our description we had as evidence the testimony of his own beloved daughter. He could never disregard that.
I took a deep breath and a large mouthful of the wine, which bolstered my resolve, and then I began to talk. I talked for a long time even by my own standards. Of course I glossed lightly over certain aspects of Serrena’s role in the proceedings; after all, she was his daughter. I decided that it was unnecessary to describe her skilful distraction of Terramesh in the moments before Rameses loosed the fatal arrow. Hurotas listened avidly, at intervals nodding his understanding and acceptance of my account.
