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

by Wilbur Smith

  Not all the Shilluk were selected for the army. The others proved to be indefatigable oarsmen on the rowing-benches of the galleys, and dedicated herdsmen and grooms, for they were born to tend their herds.

  We very soon learned that their hereditary enemies were the tribes that lived further to the south, the Dinka and the Mandari. These other tribes were even more primitive, and lacked the fighting instincts of our Shilluk. Nothing pleased Tanus’ new Shilluk regiments better than to be sent south with their Egyptian officers and supported by the chariots against their ancient foes. They rounded up the Dinka and Mandari in their thousands. We used them for the heavy unskilled work. None of them came in willingly, as some of our Shilluk had done.

  * * *

  Once we had brought the fleet up through the fifth cataract, the entire land of Cush lay open to us. With our Shilluk now to guide us, the fleet sailed on up-river, while our chariot divisions ranged widely along each bank, and returned with more ivory and fresh levies of slaves.

  Soon we reached a wide river-course that joined the main flow of the Nile from the east. The flow of this river was restricted to a sullen trickle down its shrunken pools. However, the Shilluk assured us that in its season this river, which we named the Atbara, would become a raging torrent, and its waters would augment the annual flood of the Nile. Queen Lostris despatched an expedition of gold-seekers, with Shilluk guides, to follow the Atbara as far as they were able. The fleet sailed on southwards, hunting and slave-raiding along the way.

  I worried to see it, and tried to prevent it, but so often these days Prince Memnon’s chariot was at the head of one of these flying columns. Naturally, he was supported by good men, I could at least see to that, but there was constant hazard and danger out there in the African bush, and he was still only a boy.

  I felt he should spend more time with me and his scrolls studying on the deck of the Breath of Horus, rather than disporting himself with the likes of Kratas and Remrem. Those two hooligans had as little concern for the prince’s safety as they had for their own. They egged him on with wagers and challenges and extravagant praise for his more daring feats. He was soon as much of a dare-devil as any of them, and when he returned from these forays, he took great pleasure in horrifying me with accounts of his escapades.

  When I protested to Tanus, he merely laughed. ‘If he is to wear the double crown one day, he must learn to spurn danger and lead men.’ My mistress agreed with Tanus in the training of Memnon. I had to content myself with making the most of what time I still had to be alone with my prince.

  At least I had my two little princesses. They were a wonderful consolation. Tehuti and Bakatha grew more enchanting each day, and I was their slave in more than name alone. Because of our peculiar circumstances I was closer to them than their true father could be. The first word that Bakatha ever said was ‘Tata’, and Tehuti refused to sleep unless I first told her a story. She pined when I was obliged to leave the fleet on other business. I think that this was the most happy period of my life. I felt that I was at the centre of my family, and solid in the affections of all of them.

  The fortunes of our nation were almost as bright as my own. Soon one of our gold-seekers returned from the expedition up the Atbara river. He knelt before Queen Lostris and laid a small leather bag at her feet. Then, at her bidding, he opened the neck of the bag and poured from it a stream of gleaming pebbles. Some of these were as small as grains of sand, and others as large as the end of my thumb. All of them shone with that peculiar radiance that cannot be mistaken.

  The goldsmiths were summoned and they worked with their furnaces and clay crucibles, and finally declared these nuggets to be veritable gold of an extraordinary purity. Tanus and I rode back up the Atbara to the site where this gold had been discovered. I helped to plan the methods that were used to mine the gravel-beds in the water-course of the river in which the gold had been trapped.

  We used thousands of Mandari and Dinka slaves to scoop out basketloads of gravel and carry these up to the sluices that the masons had carved out of the granite slopes in the hills above the river.

  To take back to my mistress I sketched pictures of the long lines of naked black slaves, their wet skins gleaming in the sunlight, toiling up the hillside, each with a heavy basket balanced on his head. When we left the miners hard at work and went back to rejoin the fleet, we carried with us five hundred deben of newly smelted gold rings.

  * * *

  We encountered yet another cataract on our voyage southwards. This was the sixth and final set of rapids, but this transit proved swifter and easier than any of the others. Our chariots and wagons were able to detour around the rapids, and so at last we reached the mystical confluence of two mighty rivers that between them became the Nile we knew and loved so well.

  ‘This is the place that Taita saw in his vision of the Mazes of Ammon-Ra. Here Hapi lets her waters flow and mingle. This is the sacred site of the goddess,’ Queen Lostris declared. ‘We have completed our voyage. It is at this place that the goddess will strengthen us for the return to Egypt. I name it Qebui, the Place of the North Wind, for it is that wind which blew us here.’

  ‘It is a propitious place. Already the goddess has shown her favour by providing us with slaves and gold,’ the great lords of the state council agreed. ‘We should voyage no further.’

  ‘It remains only to find a site for the tomb of my husband, Pharaoh Mamose,’ Queen Lostris decreed. ‘Once the tomb is built and Pharaoh sealed in it, then my vow will have been fulfilled and it will be time to return in triumph to our very Egypt. Only once that has been done can we go up against the Hyksos tyrant and drive him from our motherland.’

  I think that I was one of the very few of all our company who was not happy and relieved by this decision. The others were consumed by home-sickness and weary of the long years of travel. I, on the other hand, had been stricken by a malady even more pernicious, that of wanderlust. I wanted to see what lay beyond the next bend of the river and over the crest of the next hill. I wanted to go on and on, to the very end of the world. Therefore I was delighted when my mistress chose me as the one to seek out the site of the royal tomb, and ordered Prince Memnon to escort me on this expedition with his squadron of chariots. Not only would I be able to indulge this new appetite of mine for travel, but I would once more have the undiluted pleasure of the prince’s company.

  At fourteen years of age, Prince Memnon was placed in command of the expedition. This was not exceptional. There have been pharaohs in our history who commanded great armies in battle when they were no older. The prince took his responsibilities on this his first independent command most seriously. The chariots were made ready, and Memnon inspected each horse and vehicle personally. We had two spare teams of horses for each chariot, so that these could be changed and rested regularly.

  Then the two of us deliberated at great length and in even greater detail as to which direction we should follow in our search for the ideal site for the king’s tomb. This should be in some rugged and uninhabited area not readily accessible to grave-robbers. There must be a cliff into which the tomb with all the subsidiary passages could be cut.

  There was no area that we had come upon since we had entered the land of Cush that satisfied these requirements. We reviewed what we knew of the land behind us and tried to divine what lay ahead. Where we stood now at Qebui, the meeting-point of the two rivers, was the loveliest place we had visited on all the long voyage.

  It seemed that all the birds of the air had gathered here, from tiny jewelled kingfishers to stately blue cranes, from whistling flocks of duck that darkened the sun in their multitudes to plovers and lapwings that scurried along the water’s edge, pausing only to ask the plaintive question, ‘Pee-wit? Pee-wit?’ In the silvery acacia groves and out on the open savannah, the herds of antelope grazed in their countless millions. It was almost as though this seat of the goddess was sacred to all degrees of life. The waters below the juncture of the rivers roiled with shoals
of fish, while in the sky above the white-headed fish eagles turned slow circles against the startling blue of the African sky and uttered their weird, yelping chant.

  Each of these twin rivers expressed a different character and mood, just as two infants sprung from the same womb can vary in every detail of body and mind. The right-hand branch was slow and yellow, greater in volume than the other, but not so assertive. The eastern branch was a murky grey-blue, an angry, overbearing flood that shoved its twin aside when they met, refusing to mingle its waters, crowding the other against the bank and retaining its own turbid character for many miles down-stream before sullenly allowing itself to be absorbed by the gentler yellow stream.

  ‘Which river must we follow, Tata?’ Memnon demanded, and I sent for the Shilluk guides.

  ‘The yellow river comes out of a vast and pestilent swamp that has no end. No man can enter there. It is a place of crocodiles and hippopotamus and stinging insects. It is a place of fever where a man might lose his way and wander for ever,’ the Shilluk told us.

  ‘What of the other river?’ we asked.

  ‘The dark river comes out of the sky, down cliffs of stone that rise up into the clouds. No man can climb the dreadful gorges.’

  ‘We will follow the dark left-hand fork,’ the prince decided. ‘In those rocky places we will find a resting-place for my father.’

  So we journeyed into the east until we saw the mountains rise on the horizon. They formed a blue rampart so tall and formidable as to surpass anything that we had ever seen or believed possible. Beside these great mountains, the hills we had known in the Nile valley were like the scratching of little birds in the sand-banks of the river. Each day as we journeyed towards them they climbed higher into the heavens and dwarfed all the world below.

  ‘No man can go up there,’ Memnon marvelled. ‘That must be the abode of the gods.’

  We watched the lightning play upon the mountains, flickering and flaring inside the tumbling banks of cloud that blanketed the peaks from our view. We listened to the thunder growling like a hunting lion amongst the gorges and the sheer valleys, and we were awestruck.

  We ventured no further than the foothills of this terrible range, and then the cliffs and gorges barred our way and turned our chariots back. In these foothills we found a hidden valley with vertical sides of stone. For twenty days the prince and I explored this wild place, until at last we stood before a black cliff-face and Memnon spoke quietly. ‘This is where my father’s earthly body will rest for all eternity.’ He stared up at the sheer stone with a dreamy and mystical expression. ‘It is as though I can hear his voice speaking in my head. He will be happy here.’

  So I surveyed this place and marked out the cliff, driving bronze pegs into the cracks in the rock, setting out the direction and the angle of the entrance passage for the masons who would come to begin this work. When this was done, we extricated ourselves from the maze of valleys and snarling gorges, and returned down the Nile to the meeting-place of the rivers, where our fleet lay.

  * * *

  We were camped on the great plains only a few days’ travel from Qebui when I was awakened in the night by the eerie grunting cries and the sound of a moving mass of animals that seemed to come from the darkness all around us.

  Memnon ordered the trumpeter to blow the call to arms, and we stood to, within the circle of chariots. We threw wood on the watch-fires and stared out into the night. In the flicker of the flames we saw a dark flood, like the spate of the Nile, streaming past us. The eerie honking cries and the snorting sounds were almost deafening, and the press of animals in this throng was so heavy that they bumped into the outer ring of chariots, and some of the vehicles were thrown over on their sides. It was not possible to rest in this uproar, and we stood to arms all the rest of that night. The flood of living creatures never abated in all that time.

  When dawn lit the scene, we were presented with the most extraordinary spectacle. In every direction as far as the eye could see, the plains were covered with a carpet of moving animals. They were all travelling in the same direction, trudging onwards with a strange fatalistic determination, heads hanging, shrouded in the dust of their own passage, uttering those weird, mournful cries. Every so often, some section of this endless herd took fright, for no reason, and tossed up their heels. They cavorted and snorted and chased each other in aimless circles, like whirlpools in the surface of a smoothly flowing river. Then they would settle back into the same plodding gait and follow the swarms ahead of them into the hazy distance.

  We stood and stared in amazement. Every animal in this vast concourse was of the same species, and each individual was identical in every respect to the next. They were all of a dark purplish hue, with a shaggy-maned dewlap and horns shaped like the crescent moon. Their heads were misshapen, with ugly bulbous noses, while their bodies sloped back from high shoulders to spindly hindquarters.

  When at last we harnessed the chariots and resumed our own journey, we passed through this living sea of animals like a fleet of galleys. They opened to allow us passage, streaming by on either hand so close that we could reach out and touch them. They were completely unafraid, and stared at us with dull, incurious eyes.

  When it was time for the midday meal, Memnon strung his bow and killed five of these antelope with as many arrows. We skinned and butchered the carcasses as their fellows streamed by us at arm’s-length. Despite the animals’ strange appearance, their flesh, when grilled on the coals of an open fire, was as good to eat as any wild game I had tasted.

  ‘This is another gift from the gods,’ Memnon declared. ‘As soon as we rejoin the main army, we will send out an expedition to follow these herds. We will be able to smoke enough meat to feed all our armies and our slaves from now until these beasts come again next year.’

  From our Shilluk guides we learned that this incredible migration was an annual occurrence as the herds moved from one grazing-ground to another, several hundred miles apart. The Shilluk called these beasts gnu, in imitation of their strange honking cry. ‘This will be a never-ending supply, one that is replenished each year,’ I informed the prince.

  None of us was then able to foresee the catastrophic events which would flow from this visitation of the ungainly gnu. I might have been warned by the manner in which they threw up their heads and snorted without reason, or by the discharge of mucus from the nostrils of some of these beasts, that I noticed as they streamed past us. However, I gave little thought to this behaviour, and judged them to be mild and harmless creatures who could bring us nothing but great benefit.

  As soon as we reached the twin rivers, we reported the migration of gnu to Queen Lostris, and she agreed with Prince Memnon’s suggestion. Assisted by Kratas and Remrem, she put him in command of a column of two hundred chariots, supported by wagons and several thousand Shilluk. She ordered him to slaughter as many gnu as could be cut up and smoked for army rations.

  I did not accompany the expedition, for the role of butcher’s assistant was not to my fancy. However, we could soon see the smoke from the fires, on which the meat was curing, darkening the horizon, and before many more days had passed, the wagons started to return, each one loaded high with blackened slabs of cured meat.

  Exactly twenty days from our first encounter with the gnu herds, I was sitting under a shady tree on the bank of the Nile, playing bao with my old and dear friend Aton. As a small indulgence to myself and out of deference to Aton, I had opened one of the precious jars of three-palm quality wine that remained from the stock which I had brought from Egypt. Aton and I played and haggled as old friends do, and sipped the wine with deep appreciation.

  We had no means of knowing that catastrophe was rushing down upon us to overwhelm us all. On the contrary, I had every reason to be pleased with myself. The previous day I had completed the drawings and plans for the building of Pharaoh’s tomb, in which I had incorporated several features to deter and frustrate the depredations of any grave-robber. Queen Lostris had approv
ed these plans and appointed one of the master masons as the overseer. She told me that I might requisition all the slaves and equipment that I needed. My mistress was determined that she would not stint in making good her vow to her dead husband. She would build him the finest tomb that my genius could design.

  I had just won the third successive board of bao from Aton and was pouring another jar of the truly excellent wine, when I heard the beat of hooves and looked up to see a horseman coming at full gallop from the direction of the chariot lines. When he was still at a distance I recognized Hui. Very few others rode astride, and certainly not at such a headlong pace. As he raced towards where we sat, I saw the expression on his face, and it alarmed me so that I stood up abruptly enough to spill the wine and upset the bao board.

  ‘Taita!’ he screamed at me from a hundred yards. ‘The horses! Sweet Isis have mercy on us! The horses!’

  He reined down his mount, and I swung up behind him and seized him around the waist. ‘Don’t waste time talking,’ I shouted in his ear. ‘Ride, fellow, ride!’

  I went to Patience first. Half the herd was down, but she was my first love. The mare lay upon her side with her chest heaving. She was old now, with grey hairs frosting her muzzle. I had not used her in the traces since the day that Blade had been killed by the elephant bull. Although she no longer pulled a chariot, she was the finest brood mare in all our herds. Her foals all inherited her great heart and vivid intelligence. She had just weaned a beautiful little colt who stood near her now, watching her anxiously.

  I knelt beside her. ‘What is it, my brave darling?’ I asked softly, and she recognized my voice, and opened her eyes.

  The lids were gummed with mucus. I was appalled by her condition. Her neck and throat were swollen to almost twice their normal girth. A vile-smelling stream of yellow pus streamed from her mouth and nostrils. The fever was burning her up, so that I could feel the heat radiate from her, as though from a camp-fire.