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

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘By Horus, I have known some brave men in my time, but none of them better than you, lad,’ he said simply, and then he lifted Memnon in his arms and hugged him to his chest.

  I did not see much more of it, for those everlasting and tedious tears of mine blotted out my vision. Even though I knew myself for a sentimental fool, I could not staunch them. I had waited too long to see this happen, to watch the father embrace his son.

  I only managed to regain control of my errant emotions when I heard the faint sound of distant cheers. What none of us had realized was that the chase had taken place in full view of the fleet. The Breath of Horus lay close in against the bank of the Nile, and I could see the slim figure of the queen upon the high poop. Even at this distance her face looked pale and her expression set.

  * * *

  The Gold of Valour is the warrior’s prize, higher in honour and in esteem than the Gold of Praise. It is only ever worn by heroes.

  We gathered on the deck of the galley, those closest to the queen and the commanders of all the divisions of her army. Stacked against the mast, the tusks of the elephants were on display like the spoils of war, and the officers wore all their regimental finery. The standard-bearers stood to attention behind the throne, and the trumpeters blew a fanfare as the prince knelt before the queen.

  ‘My beloved subjects!’ the queen spoke out clearly. ‘Noble officers of my council, generals and officers of my army, I commend to you the crown prince, Memnon, who has found favour in my sight and in the sight of you all.’ She smiled down on the eleven-year-old boy who was being treated like a victorious general.

  ‘For his courageous conduct in the field, I command that he be received into the regiment of the Blue Crocodile Guards, with the rank of subaltern of the second class, and I bestow upon him the Gold of Valour, that he may wear it with pride and distinction.’

  The chain had been especially forged by the royal goldsmiths to fit the neck of a boy of Memnon’s age, but with my own hands I had sculpted the tiny golden elephant that was suspended from the chain. It was perfect in every detail, a miniature masterpiece with garnet chips for eyes and real ivory tusks. It looked well as it hung against the smooth, unblemished skin of the prince’s chest.

  I felt my tears coming on again as the men cheered my beautiful prince, but I fought them back with an effort. I was not the only one who was wallowing in sentiment like a wart-hog in a mud bath; even Kratas and Remrem and Astes, for all their hardbitten and cavalier attitudes which they usually cultivated so assiduously, were grinning like idiots, and I swear I saw more than one pair of wet eyes in their ranks. In the same way as his parents, the boy had a way with the affections and loyalties of men. Every officer of the Blues came forward at the end to salute the prince and embrace him gravely as a comrade-in-arms.

  That evening, as we drove together along the bank of the Nile in the sunset, Memnon suddenly reined in the horses and turned to me. ‘I have been called to my regiment. I am a soldier at last, so you must make me my own bow now, Tata.’

  ‘I will make you the finest bow that any archer has ever drawn,’ I promised.

  He considered me gravely for a while, and then he sighed, ‘Thank you, Tata. I think this is the happiest day of all my life.’ The way he said it made eleven years seem like hoary old age.

  The next day after the fleet had moored for the night, I went to look for the prince and found him alone upon the bank in a spot that was hidden from casual observation. He had not seen me, so I could observe him for a while.

  He was stark naked. Despite my warnings about currents and crocodiles, it was obvious that he had been swimming in the river, for his hair was sopping wet upon his shoulders. However, I was puzzled by his behaviour, for he had selected two large round stones from the beach and was holding one of these in each hand, raising and lowering them in some strange ritual.

  ‘Tata, you are spying on me,’ he said suddenly, without turning his head. ‘Do you want something from me?’

  ‘I want to know what you are doing with those stones. Are you worshipping some strange new Cushite god?’

  ‘I am making my arms strong so that I can draw my new bow. I want it to have a full draw-weight. You are not to fob me off with another toy, Tata, do you hear?’

  * * *

  There was one more cataract across the river, the fifth and what would later prove to be the penultimate that we would encounter upon our voyage. However, this was not the same barrier to our progress that the other four had been. With the change in the surrounding terrain, we were no longer restricted to the course of the river.

  While we waited for the Nile to rise again, we planted our crops as usual, but we were able to send out our chariots to range far and wide across the savannah. My mistress despatched expeditions southwards to pursue the elephant herds and bring back the ivory.

  Those vast herds of the magnificent grey beasts that had greeted us so trustingly when first we had sailed into Cush, were now flown and scattered. We had hunted them ruthlessly wherever we found them, but these sage creatures learned their lesson well and right swiftly.

  When we arrived at the fifth cataract, we found the herds grazing in the groves on either bank. The elephant were in their thousands, and Tanus ordered the chariots into action immediately. We had refined our tactics of hunting them and we had learned how to avoid the losses that those first two bulls had inflicted upon us. At the fifth cataract, on the very first day, we killed one hundred and seven elephant, for the loss of only three chariots.

  The following day there was not a single elephant in sight from the decks of the ships. Although the chariots pursued the herds, following the roads they had left through the forest as they fled, it was five days before they caught up with them again.

  Very often now the hunting expeditions returned to our encampment below the cataract after being out for many weeks on end without having found a single elephant or gathered a single tusk. What had seemed to us at first to be an endless supply of ivory had proved an illusion. As the prince had remarked on that very first day, elephant-hunting was not as simple as it first seemed.

  However, those chariots ranging southwards did not return entirely empty-handed. They had found something even more valuable to us than ivory. They had found men.

  I had not left the encampment for several months for I had been involved in the eternal experimentation with my chariot wheels. It was at this period that I at last found the solutions to the problem which had plagued me from the very beginning, and which had been such a source of amusement and ridicule to Tanus and his military cronies—the occasional failure of some of my designs.

  In the end, it was not a single answer, but a combination of factors, beginning with the material from which the spokes of the wheels were made. I now had an almost unlimited selection of various types of wood to work with, and the horn of oryx and rhinoceros which we hunted close to our settlement, and which, unlike the elephant herds, did not move away after being harassed.

  I found that soaking the red heartwood of the giraffe acacia rendered it so hard that it would turn the edge of the sharpest bronze axe-head. I compounded this wood with layers of horn and bound it all up together with bronze wire, very much in the same fashion as I had done with the bowstock of Lanata. The result was that at last I had a wheel that could be driven to the utmost over any type of terrain without collapsing. When Hui and I had completed the first ten chariots with these new wheels, I challenged Kratas and Remrem, who were the most notoriously heavy-handed and destructive drivers in all the army, to try to smash them up. The wager that we agreed on was ten deben of gold a side.

  This was a game much to the liking of those two overgrown children, and they entered into the spirit of it with boyish gusto. For weeks thereafter, their raucous cries and the sound of pounding hooves rang through the groves on the banks of the Nile. By the time their limit was up, Hui came to me complaining bitterly that they had worn out twenty teams of horses. However, it was so
me consolation to him that we had won the wager. Our new wheels had stood the most stringent test.

  ‘If you had given us a few days more,’ Kratas groused as he handed over his gold with a marked lack of sporting grace, ‘I know I would have managed another Tata.’ And he treated us to a pantomime which he thought amusing and which was supposed to suggest a shattering wheel and a somersaulting driver.

  ‘You are a gifted clown, brave Kratas, but I have your gold.’ I jingled it under his nose. ‘All you have is a tired old jest that has gone sour on you.’

  It was then that the scouting expedition, led by Lord Aqer, that had gone out to find elephant, came back with the news that instead they had found human habitation further to the south.

  We had expected to come across the tribes as soon as we passed the first cataract. For centuries the land of Cush had produced slaves. These had been captured by their own people, probably in tribal warfare, and carried down with other commodities of trade—ivory and ostrich feathers and rhinoceros horn and gold dust—to the outposts of our empire. Queen Lostris’ saucy black handmaidens were natives of this land and had come to her from the slave-markets in Elephantine.

  I still cannot explain why we had not found people before this. Perhaps they had been driven back by wars and slave raids, in the same way as we had scattered the elephant herds. They may have been wiped out by famine or plague, it was impossible to say. Up until now we had found scant evidence of human presence.

  However, now that we had finally caught up with them, the excitement was an epidemic in our company. We needed slaves more even than we needed ivory or gold. Our whole civilization and way of life was based upon the system of slave ownership, a system that was condoned by the gods and sanctified by ancient usage. We had been able to bring very few of our own slaves with us from Egypt, and now it was imperative for our survival and growth as a nation that we capture more to replace those we had been forced to abandon.

  Tanus ordered a full-scale expeditionary force to be sent out immediately. He would lead it himself, for we were uncertain what we would find up-river. Apart from those taken as prisoners of war, we Egyptians had always purchased our slaves from foreign traders, and this was the first time in centuries, as far as I knew, that we were forced to resort to catching our own. It was sport as new to us as elephant-hunting, but at least this time we did not expect our quarry to be either docile or dull-witted.

  Tanus would still not ride with any other driver than me, and even Kratas’ and Remrem’s unsuccessful efforts to destroy them had not yet convinced him of the virtue of my new chariots. We led the column, but the second chariot in line was driven by the youngest subaltern of the Blues, the crown prince, Memnon.

  I had chosen the two very best charioteers to act as crew for Memnon. His own weight was so light that the chariot could carry an extra man, and the prince’s strength had not developed sufficiently for him to be able to lift his end of the chariot when it was necessary to dismount and carry it over the obstacles that could not be driven over. He needed that extra man to help him.

  The first villages we came across were on the river-bank, three days’ travel above the cataract. They were groups of miserable grass shelters too rudimentary to be called huts. Tanus sent scouts forward to reconnoitre, and then in the dawn we surrounded them with a single swift rush.

  The people that stumbled out of these crude shelters were too dazed and shocked to offer any resistance, or even attempt to run from us. They clung together and chattered and gaped at the ring of chariots and shields that we had thrown around them.

  ‘A fine catch!’ Tanus was delighted as we looked them over. The men were tall and lean, with long, slim limbs. They towered over most of the men in our ranks; even Tanus seemed short in comparison as we walked amongst them, sorting them into groups as a farmer might apportion his herds.

  ‘There are some really good specimens,’ he enthused. ‘Look at that beauty.’ He had picked out a young man of exceptional physique. ‘He would fetch ten rings of gold on the slave-market at Elephantine on any day.’

  Their women were strong and healthy. Their backs were straight and their teeth were white and even. Every mature female carried an infant on her hip and led another by the hand.

  Yet they were the most primitive peoples I had ever encountered. Neither men nor women wore a shred of clothing, and they left their pudenda shamelessly bared, though the younger girls wore a single string of beads made from the shells of ostrich eggs around their waist. I could see at once that the mature women had all been circumcised in the most brutal fashion. Later I learned that either a flint knife or a sliver of bamboo was used for this operation. Their vaginas were scarred and deformed into open pits, and then infibulated with slivers of bone or ivory. The younger girls had not yet suffered this mutilation, and I determined that this custom would be outlawed in the future. I was certain that I could rely on the support of my mistress in this.

  Their skins were so dark that their naked bodies appeared purple in the early sunlight, the colour of an over-ripe black grape. Some of them had smeared themselves with a paste of ashes and white clay, on which they had daubed crude patterns with their fingertips. They had dressed their hair with a mixture of ox-blood and clay into a tall, shiny helmet which exaggerated their already impressive height.

  One thing that struck me immediately was that there were no old people among them. I learned later that it was their custom to break the legs of the elderly with their war clubs and leave them on the bank of the river as a sacrifice to the crocodiles. They believed that the crocodiles were reincarnations of their dead ancestors, and that by feeding them, the victim became a part of this process.

  They had forged no metal artefacts. Their weapons were wooden clubs and sharpened sticks. The potter’s art had eluded them and their vessels were the gourds of wild plants. They planted no crops, but lived on the fish they caught in basket-traps, and on the herds of stunted long-horned cattle which were their most prized possessions. They bled them from a vein in the neck and mixed the blood with milk warm from the udder, and drank the curdled mess with the utmost relish.

  When I studied them over the months that followed, I found that they could neither read nor write. Their only musical instrument was a drum hollowed from a tree-trunk, and their songs were the grunting and braying of wild animals. Their dances were flagrant parodies of the sexual act in which ranks of naked men and women approached each other, stamping and grinding their hips until they met. When this happened, the imitation was transformed into reality, and the most licentious debaucheries were enacted.

  When Prince Memnon questioned me as to what right we had to capture these people and take possession of them like cattle, I told him, ‘They are savages, and we are civilized people. As a father has a duty to his son, it is our duty to lift them from their brutish state, and to show them the true gods. Their part of the bargain is that they repay us with their labour.’ Memnon was a bright lad, and after I had explained it to him he never again questioned the logic or the morality of it.

  At my suggestion, my mistress had allowed two of her black hand-maidens to accompany the expedition. My personal relationship with these little hussies had not been entirely untroubled, but now they rendered invaluable service. Both these girls had childhood memories of the time before their capture, and they retained a rudimentary knowledge of the language of these tribes of Cush. This was just sufficient for us to begin the process of taming our captives. As a musician, I have an ear tuned to the sounds of the human voice; added to this, I have also a natural linguistic ability. Within a very few weeks I was able to speak the language of the Shilluk, which was what these people were called.

  Their language was as primitive as their customs and their way of life. Their entire vocabulary did not exceed five hundred words, which I recorded on my scrolls and taught to the slave-masters and to the army instructors whom Tanus appointed over the fresh-caught slaves. For among these people Tanus had found hi
s infantry regiments to complement the chariot divisions.

  This first raid gave us no real warning of the true warlike nature of the Shilluk. It had all gone too easily, and we were unprepared for what followed when we swept down on the next straggle of villages. By this time the Shilluk had been alerted, and they were ready to meet us.

  They had driven away their cattle herds and hidden their women and children. Naked and armed only with wooden clubs, they came in their hordes against our chariots and recurved bows and swords, with a courage and tenacity that surpassed belief.

  ‘By the putrid wax in Seth’s ear-hole,’ Kratas swore with delight after we had driven back another charge, ‘every one of these black devils is a soldier born.’

  ‘Trained and armed with bronze, these Shilluk will stand out against any other foot-soldiers in the world,’ Tanus agreed. ‘Leave the bows on the racks. I want as many of them as we can catch alive.’

  In the end, Tanus ran them to exhaustion with the chariots, and only when they fell to their knees with even their extraordinary stamina and reckless courage totally expended, could the slave-masters put the ropes on them.

  Tanus selected the best of them for his infantry regiments, and he learned their language as readily as I did. The Shilluk soon looked upon him as a god to replace their crocodiles, and Tanus came to love them almost as much as I loved my horses. In the end it was no longer necessary to catch the Shilluk like animals. These marvellously tall and willowy spearmen came out of their hiding-places in the reeds and bushy gulleys of their own accord, to seek Tanus out and to beg to be allowed to join his regiments.

  Tanus armed them with long bronze-tipped spears and shields made from elephant hide, and he uniformed them in kilts of wild-cat tails and head-dresses of ostrich feathers. His sergeants drilled them in all the classic evolutions of war, and we learned swiftly to integrate these tactics with those of the chariots.