River God: A Novel of Ancient Egypt (Novels of Ancient Egypt)

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘There is something, but you will not agree to it, any more than Tanus will agree to wear the crown.’

  ‘If you care anything for me, you will not even suggest it.’ She understood me immediately, and recoiled from me as though I had struck her. ‘I would rather die myself than kill this miracle of love that Tanus has placed in my womb. The child is him and me and our love. I could never murder all of that.’

  ‘Then, Your Majesty, there is nothing more that I can suggest to you.’

  She smiled at me with such sublime trust and confidence that it took my breath away. ‘I know you will think of something, my darling Taita. You always do.’

  And so I had a dream.

  * * *

  I related my dream before a full session of the council of state called by the regent of this very Egypt.

  Queen Lostris and Prince Memnon were seated upon the throne high on the poop-deck of the Breath of Horus. The galley was moored to the west bank of the Nile. The members of the council were seated upon the beach below her.

  Lord Merkeset and the nobility represented the secular arm of the state. The high priests of Ammon-Ra and Osiris and Hapi represented the sacred arm. Lord Harrab and fifty of his senior officers stood for the military.

  I stood upon the open deck below the throne and faced this distinguished gathering. I had taken even greater pains than usual with my appearance. My make-up was subtle and cunning. My hair was dressed with fragrant oils, and coiled in the fashion that I had made popular. I wore the two chains of the Gold of Praise around my neck, and my chest and arms were shaped and hardened by chariot-driving. I must have presented an extraordinary figure of beauty to them, for many of them gaped at me, and I saw the lust in the eyes of those whose inclinations ran in that direction.

  ‘Your Majesties,’ I made the low salutation to the pair upon the throne, and Prince Memnon grinned at me cheekily. His head was still bandaged, although it was no longer necessary. He was so proud of his war wound that I had let him keep it on. I frowned at him, and he adjusted his expression to be more in keeping with the occasion.

  ‘Your Majesties, last night I dreamed a strange and wonderful dream which I feel it is my duty to relate. I beg your leave to speak.’

  Queen Lostris replied graciously, ‘Every person in this company is aware of the sacred gift that you have. The prince and I know that you are able to see into the future, and to divine the will and the wishes of the gods through dreams and visions. I command you now to speak of these mysteries.’

  I bowed again and turned to face the council.

  ‘Last night I slept at the door to the royal cabin, as is my duty. Queen Lostris lay alone upon her couch, and the prince slept in his alcove beyond her bed.’

  Even Lord Merkeset leaned forward and held his cupped hand behind his good ear, the other being stone-deaf. They all loved a good story and a fruity prophecy.

  ‘In the third watch of the night I awoke, and there was a strange light glowing throughout the ship. I felt a cold wind blowing upon my cheek although every door and porthole was closed.’

  My audience stirred with interest. I had struck the right ghostly tone.

  ‘Then I heard footsteps echoing through the hull, slow and majestic footsteps, such as never were made by mortal man.’ I paused dramatically. ‘These weird and eerie sounds came from the hold of the galley.’ I paused again for them to absorb this.

  ‘Yes, my lords, from the hold where the gold coffin of Pharaoh Mamose, the eighth of that name, lies awaiting burial.’

  Some of my audience shuddered with awe, while others made the sign against evil.

  ‘These footsteps drew closer to where I lay at the queen’s door. The heavenly glow of light grew stronger, and while I trembled, a figure appeared before me. It was the shape of a man, but it was not human, for it glowed like the full moon and its face was a divine reincarnation of the king as I had known him, yet altered and filled with all the terrible divinity of his godhead.’

  They were rapt and silent. Not a man stirred. I searched their faces for any sign of incredulity, but I found none.

  Then suddenly a child’s voice broke the silence, as the prince cried out high and clear, ‘Bak-Her! It was my father. Bak-Her! It was Pharaoh!’

  They took up the cry, ‘Bak-Her! It was Pharaoh. May he live for ever!’

  I waited for the silence, and when it returned I let it draw out to the point where they were almost overwhelmed by the suspense.

  ‘Pharaoh came towards me, and I could not move. He passed me and entered the cabin of Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Lostris. Though I could neither move nor utter a sound, I saw all that came to pass. While the queen still slept, the divine pharaoh mounted upon her in all his splendour, and he took his husbandly pleasure with her. Their bodies were joined as man and woman.’

  There was still no sign of disbelief on any face. I waited for the full effect of my words and then I went on, ‘Pharaoh rose from the bosom of the sleeping queen, and he looked upon me and he spoke thus.’

  I am able to mimic the sound of other men’s voices so faithfully that others believe they hear the one I am imitating. I spoke now in the voice of Pharaoh Mamose.

  ‘I have endowed the queen with my godhead. She has become one with me and the gods. I have impregnated her with my divine seed. She who has known no man but me, will bear a child of my royal blood. This will be a sign to all men that she enjoys my protection, and that I will watch over her still.’

  I bowed once more to the royal pair upon the throne. ‘Then the king passed back through the ship, and entered once more his golden coffin where he now rests. That was all my vision.’

  ‘May Pharaoh live for ever!’ shouted Lord Tanus, as I had coached him, and the cry was taken up.

  ‘Hail, Queen Lostris! May she live for ever! Hail, the divine child she bears! May all her children live for ever!’

  That night when I prepared to retire, my mistress called me to her, and she whispered, ‘Your vision was so vivid and you told it so well that I shall not be able to sleep lest Pharaoh come again. Guard the door well.’

  ‘I dare say there may be one bold and importunate enough to disturb your royal slumber, but I doubt that it will be Pharaoh Mamose. If some rascal does come to take advantage of your kind and loving nature, what should I do?’

  ‘Sleep soundly, dear Taita, and stop your ears.’ Her cheeks glowed pink in the lamplight as she blushed.

  Once again my premonition of future events was proved accurate. That night there came a secret visitor to my mistress’s cabin, and it was not the ghost of Pharaoh. I did what Queen Lostris had ordered. I stopped my ears.

  * * *

  The Nile flooded once again, reminding us that another year had passed. We had reaped the corn that we had planted upon the islands, and we gathered in our herds. We broke down the chariots and packed them on the open decks of the galleys. We rolled up the tents and stowed them in the holds. Finally, when all was ready for our departure, we laid out the ropes upon the bank and put every able-bodied man and horse into the traces.

  It took us almost a month of heart-breaking labour to make the transit of this fearsome cataract. We lost sixteen men drowned, and five galleys broken and chewed to splinters by the fangs of black rock. But at last we were through, and we set sail upon the smooth flow of the river above the rapids.

  As the weeks turned to months, the Nile described a slow and majestic bend beneath our keels. Since leaving Elephantine, I had charted the course of the river. I had used the sun and the stars to give me direction, but I had come upon a great difficulty in measuring the distance that we travelled. At first I had ordered one of the slaves to walk along the bank and count every pace he took, but I knew that this method was so inaccurate that it would set all my calculations to nought.

  The solution came to me one morning while we were out on chariot manoeuvres. I watched my right-hand wheel turning, and realized that each revolution of the rim made an exact measure of the g
round that it had covered. Thereafter a chariot followed the bank of the river. One wheel had a flag on the rim, and a reliable man sat on the footplate and made a mark on a scroll for each time the flag came around.

  Each evening I calculated the direction and distance we had travelled during the day, and marked it up on my chart. Slowly, the design and shape of the river made itself clear to me. I saw that we had made a vast loop out into the west, but that now the river had turned back into the south, as the priests of Hapi had predicted.

  I showed my findings to Tanus and the queen. Many nights we sat late in the royal cabin, discussing the course of the river and how it would affect our plans to return to Egypt. It seemed that every mile along the river that we travelled, far from dimming my mistress’s determination, served but to enhance the force of the vow she had made to return.

  ‘We will build no temple nor palace of stone in the wilderness,’ she ordered. ‘We will set up no monument or obelisk. Our sojourn here is transitory. We will build no cities, but will live in our ships, or under tents and huts made of grass and reeds. We are a caravan on a journey that in the end will take us back to the city of my birth, beautiful Thebes of a hundred gates.’

  In private she counselled me, ‘Keep your charts well, Taita. I trust you to find the easy way home for us.’

  So our river caravan journeyed onwards, and the desert on either hand changed its face with every mile, and yet in the end was unchanged.

  We who sailed upon the river had become a close-knit community, almost an itinerant city without walls or permanent structure. Life burgeoned and faded. Our numbers increased, for most of those who had come with us from Elephantine were in the full bloom of life, and the women were fruitful. Young couples married upon the river-bank, and broke the jar of Nile water between them. Children were born, and we watched them grow.

  Some of our old people died, and there were accidents and dangers that took toll of the younger ones. We embalmed them and dug tombs for them in the wild hills and left them to their slumber, and went onwards.

  We observed the festivals and prayed to our gods. We feasted and fasted in the correct season, and danced and sang and studied the sciences. I held lessons for the older children upon the deck of the galley, and Memnon was the prize of all my students.

  Before the year had run out, and while the course of the river still ran southwards, we came upon the third cataract that bestrode the course of the Nile. Once again we went ashore and cleared the land and planted our crops, while we waited for the Nile to rise and help us through.

  * * *

  It was here at the third great cataract that another joy came to fill my life to overflowing.

  In a linen tent upon the bank of the river, I attended my mistress in her labour, and brought forth into this world the Princess Tehuti, the acknowledged daughter of the long-dead Pharaoh Mamose.

  In my eyes Tehuti was beautiful as only a miracle might be. Whenever I had the opportunity, I sat beside her cot and examined her tiny feet and hands with wonder and awe. When she was hungry and waited for her mother’s nipple, I would sometimes place my little finger in her mouth for the pleasure of feeling her chewing on it with her bald gums.

  The river rose at last and allowed us to make the transit of the third cataract. We sailed onwards, and almost imperceptibly the river turned back into the east, describing a vast loop beneath our keels.

  Before the year was out it was necessary for me to dream another of my famous dreams, for my mistress had once more suffered a virgin pregnancy that could only be explained by supernatural means. The ghost of the dead pharaoh had been on the prowl again.

  My mistress was huge with child when we reached the fourth great cataract of the river. This chute of tumbling waters and rocks like the teeth of crocodiles was even more formidable than those that had come before, and there was much despondency in our company. When they thought that no one could overhear them they complained to each other, ‘We are beset by these infernal rock barriers. The gods have placed them across the river to prevent us going onwards.’

  I read their lips as they huddled together on the bank of the river. None of them realized that I was able to understand what they said without hearing their words.

  ‘We will be trapped behind these terrible rapids, and we will never be able to return down-river. We should turn back now, before it is too late.’

  Even at the councils of state, I saw the words on the lips of some of the great lords of Egypt who sat at the back of the gathering and spoke to each other in muted tones. ‘If we go on, we shall all die in this desert, and our souls will wander eternally through it without rest.’

  There was an element amongst the young nobility that was both arrogant and headstrong. They were fostering discontent, and hatching insurrection. I knew that we had to act swiftly and with resolution, when I saw the Lord Aqer say to one of his henchmen, ‘We are in the hands of this woman, this little harlot of a dead king, when what we really need is a strong man to lead us. There must be some way we can rid ourselves of her.’

  Firstly, with the help of my old friend Aton, I ferreted out the names of all the malcontents and potential traitors. It did not surprise me that at the head of this list was this same Lord Aqer, the eldest son of Lord Merkeset, on whose lips I had read those traitorous sentiments. Aqer was an angry young man with inflated ideas of his own worth and importance. I suspected that he had the gall to see a vision of himself seated upon the throne of the two kingdoms with the double crown upon his head.

  When I explained to Tanus and my mistress what I thought must be done, they called a full and solemn state council on the river-bank.

  Queen Lostris opened the conclave. ‘I know very well how you pine for your own land, and how you weary of this long voyage. I share with you every dream of Thebes.’

  I saw Aqer exchange meaningful glances with his cronies, and had my suspicions strengthened.

  ‘However, citizens of Egypt, nothing is as bad as it seems. Hapi has watched over our expedition, as he promised. We are much closer to Thebes than any one of you can imagine. When we return to our beloved city, we will not have to retrace our same weary footsteps. We will not have to face once again the dangers and the hardships of those hellish cataracts that block the course of the river.’

  There was a stirring through her audience, and whispers of doubt and disbelief. Aqer laughed, not loud enough to cross the borders of respect and propriety, nevertheless my mistress singled him out. ‘I see, Lord Aqer, that you question my word?’

  ‘By no means, Your Majesty. I curse such a disloyal thought.’ Aqer made a hasty retreat. He was not yet strong enough, nor sure enough of his support, to force a confrontation. I had caught him out before he was prepared.

  ‘My slave, Taita, has plotted the course of the river that we have covered in these last years,’ Queen Lostris went on. ‘You have all seen the chariot with the flagged wheel that has measured the ground, and Taita has studied the heavenly bodies to find the direction of our journey. I order him now to arise before the council and reveal to us his calculations.’

  Prince Memnon had helped me to trace copies of my chart on to twenty new scrolls. At nine years of age, the prince was already a fine pen-man. I passed these out to all the senior nobles, so that they might follow my lecture more clearly. I drew their attention to the almost circular course that we had followed since we had left Elephantine.

  Their astonishment was evident. Only the priests had some prior knowledge of what had occurred, they also studied the stars and had some expertise in navigation. But even they were taken aback by the extent of the river’s loop. This was not surprising, since the copies of the map that I showed them were not entirely accurate. I had taken certain liberties with the facts for the benefit of Aqer and his faction, and made the distance across the bight seem shorter than my calculations suggested was the case.

  ‘My lords, as you can see by these charts, since we left the second cataract we have
travelled very nearly a thousand miles, but we stand now not much more than a few hundred miles from the point of our departure.’

  Kratas rose to his feet to ask a question that I had placed in his mouth before the meeting began. ‘Does this mean that it should be possible to take this short cut across the desert and reach the second cataract in the same time as it takes to travel from Thebes to the Red Sea and return? I have made that journey several times.’

  I turned to him. ‘I was your companion on that same journey. Ten days in each direction it took us, and we did not have horses then. The crossing of this narrow strip of desert would be no more onerous. It means that from here one could be back in the city of Elephantine within a few short months, and it would be necessary to transit only the first cataract at Assoun.’

  There was a buzz of comment and amazement. The maps were passed from hand to hand and scrutinized avidly. The entire mood of the assembly changed, as I watched. There was a pathetic eagerness amongst all of them to accept my theory. This unexpected proximity to home and the land they knew cheered all of them.

  Only Aqer and his friends were out of countenance. He had been deprived of the top dice in the game he was playing. As I had hoped he would do, he rose angrily to his feet now to put the next question to me.

  ‘How accurate are this slave’s scribblings?’ His tone was offensive and his expression haughty. ‘It is a simple matter to make a few pen-strokes on a scroll, but when those are turned into miles of sand and rock, it is another matter entirely. How will this slave prove that these wild theories of his are fact?’

  ‘My lord Aqer has come to the very heart of the matter,’ my mistress intervened pleasantly, ‘and, in so doing, has proven his astute grasp of the problem that faces us. I intend to send an expedition of good men to cross the neck of the desert and to open up our return route to the north, the road home to beautiful Thebes.’

  I saw Aqer’s expression change suddenly as he caught the slant of the queen’s speech and realized the trap that had been set for him. He sat down again hurriedly, and tried to appear remote and disinterested. However, my mistress continued remorselessly, ‘I was undecided as to who was best suited to lead this expedition, but now Lord Aqer has, by his perception and understanding, proposed himself for this vital task. Is that not the case, my lord?’ she asked sweetly, and then went on smoothly before he could refuse.