Enslaved by the Desert Trader

by Greta Gilbert

  Imhoter stood with his head bowed. ‘You would leave Memphis without its King?’ The long sleeves of Imhoter’s robe concealed his hands, which he squeezed together nervously.

  After the Libu raid on the grain tent the King had ordered the remaining members of the King’s Guard into the desert. They were only a few dozen soldiers in search of hundreds of Redlanders who might as well have been ghosts. It had been a thoughtless decision, for it was well known that the desert tribes were highly dispersed. They came together only for raids, and could easily evade the Khemetian headhunters.

  But such facts were meaningless to King Khufu. In his fury over the grain tent raid he had acted without thinking. He had sent the city’s defenders on a fool’s errand and left the city itself vulnerable to attack. And now he apparently wanted to abandon the city completely.

  ‘Abu is the only answer,’ the monarch ranted, thrusting his soft, thick finger at Imhoter’s chest. ‘I must go to Abu and appeal to Khnum, God of the Great River. If we do not have the flood soon, we all shall perish.’

  Imhoter measured his response. ‘I would merely suggest that you consider the idea more closely, Your Majesty.’

  Imhoter knew of several wealthy priests who had accumulated enough grain to support small armies of followers. One priest in particular—a wretched old man named Menis—seemed poised to usurp Khufu’s power. The King’s departure would be just the opportunity Menis needed to install his army and take the throne.

  ‘Abu is very far away. Let us think on the idea for a time.’

  ‘But there is no more time, old eunuch!’ The King barked. He paced across the shady terrace, his leather sandals slapping against the tiles. ‘The royal grain is gone; the people of Khemet grow desperate. If the waters of Hapi do not come the citizens of Memphis will unseat me soon.’

  If you leave the city, they will unseat you sooner! Imhoter thought, though knew he could not speak his mind.

  Like his father before him, King Khufu was prone to flights of rage, so Imhoter spoke calmly, keeping to the facts. ‘The upriver journey is long—four weeks at least, even with strong north winds. Your idea is brilliant, but I am sure you wish to think on it.’

  ‘There is no thinking, eunuch, only listening to the Gods—and what I hear is mighty Horus, whispering to me. He is telling me to go to the Isle of Abu, to beg for Hapi.’

  King Khufu paced incessantly, but Imhoter remained still. He, too, yearned for Hapi, but not for the same reasons as the King. The farmers of Khemet suffered, and it tried the holy man’s soul. Their limbs grew lifeless, their bellies ballooned with want. To watch them wither and die was a punishment Imhoter did not know if he could endure.

  What gives a King’s life more value than a farmer’s, or even a beggar’s? The question tickled the edges of Imhoter’s mind like an itch he could not scratch. It had been a long time since he had considered it, though it was perhaps, the most important question of his life. A woman had asked it of him in innocence long ago, and he had been unable to answer her. She had been a forgotten concubine of King Sneferu, and she had studied him with eyes as deep and endless as the night.

  Now Khufu lifted his hands to the sky. ‘The Gods must verify that I am Khemet’s rightful ruler—that my great tomb was not erected in vain. I must bring the flood.’

  Imhoter nodded obediently, hoping that the King’s reckless compulsion would pass. He closed his eyes and begged the Gods to send him a vision of the future—one of the river rising and the King seated safely on his throne. But no such vision came.

  ‘Advise both my queens,’ the King pronounced. ‘If Hapi does not arrive by the Feast of Hathor, we make for the Isle of Abu.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Tahar had not planned on taking the woman to the Isle of Abu, so exceedingly far south. He had wanted to stay near the Big Green ports, where the boats were as plentiful as merchants in need of brides. He could have traded her for a fine vessel at some dock in Alexandria, for example, or at one of the marshland bazaars in Tanis.

  Thanks to his own stubborn pride, however, they were headed for Abu, as far south as one could go in Khemet before passing into the tribal lands of Nubia. Instead of days, their journey would now take many weeks, travelling from oasis to oasis by night, paralleling the Great River as they moved ever southward through the desert.

  Lands, he was a fool. It would be a long, difficult trek, made harder still by the fact that he was a wanted man. By now all of Khemet would have heard about the grain raid, and his Libu scar marked him as the enemy. It did not matter that he was Libu no more, that he had renounced the bloodthirsty thieves whom he had once called brothers. The Khemetians needed scapegoats as much as the Libu did, and Tahar made an easy target.

  The morning sun lifted above the horizon, piercing Tahar’s eyes. They would arrive at the next oasis soon. He could see a small verdant patch in the distance, at the base of several low cliffs. Meanwhile, the woman had begun to doze in the saddle. He had not joined her there during the night’s journey, choosing instead to walk. He did not trust himself so close to her, though he knew he would have to ride with her soon. They had a long, dangerous journey ahead.

  If they survived, however, Tahar stood to reap a fine reward. Though much of Nubia’s gold now lay buried in the tombs of Khemetian kings, the Nubians were no paupers. A wealthy Nubian chief would not pass up the opportunity to add a Khemetian bride to his harem, and he would pay well for her—in dozens of gold ingots.

  The promise of a well-paying Nubian husband was not the only reason they journeyed south, however. Tahar’s purpose was also philosophical. The Isle of Abu was just that—an island—and he was determined to prove it to the obstinate woman. The Great River did not begin at Abu, as she so passionately believed. And an imaginary god did not dwell beneath the island, considering when to release his torrent.

  But he did not only wish to educate her—he wanted to astound her. What would she think the moment she saw her Great River from the top of the Theban peak? Finally she would understand that her gods did not simply conjure the Great River from under their robes!

  Not that she would likely appreciate the geography lesson, or any of his knowledge of the desert. The woman had pricked his nerves with her talk of gods and maat and the eternal, infernal land of Khemet. If he could just get one single Khemetian to understand that Khemet was not the centre of the world, and that their precious river was not controlled by gods, he would die a happy man.

  But why was it so important for him to convince her? Perhaps it was her incredible obstinacy that had baited him. What had she called her people? The ‘chosen ones.’ The nerve of that!

  ‘We shall eat and take our rest at the oasis ahead,’ Tahar explained, attempting to rouse her.

  She opened her eyes and swatted the air, as if his very words were a nuisance. Then she resumed her sleep.

  By the Gods, she was spoiled. She had no idea of the knife’s edge of survival upon which they trod. She was the kind of Khemetian woman he loathed.

  So why did she invade his thoughts like a swarm of locusts?

  He stole another glance at her. She still wore his headdress around her breasts and waist. He would ask for it back soon. In exchange he would gift her the sandals and addax-skin dress he had made for her. The soft amber-haired garment was now completely dry and ready for donning, and he looked forward to seeing her in it.

  He led the horse to a cluster of large boulders at the base of the cliffs. ‘Stay here while I see that the oasis is safe,’ he explained to the woman, who appeared barely to be able to keep her eyes open. ‘I will not be long.’

  It took him no time to inspect the site. The pool was small, but it looked cool and inviting. There were no Libu raiders about, nor any men of the King’s Guard. Tahar studied the ground and found no footprints of predators or any other kind of threat. But when he return
ed to the boulders there was no horse...and no woman.

  He did not panic, though he cursed himself for not having foreseen it. Of course she would try to escape on his horse. Her drowsiness had been feigned: she had been waiting for this chance all night.

  He rounded the boulders and spotted her, heading east at a full gallop. He swallowed hard—because she looked so beautiful and strong atop the horse, because her plan was both bold and clever, and because he knew exactly what he had to do next.

  He placed his fingers to his lips and his high whistle split the morning. His horse slowed, then reared up, just as he had trained it to do. Its front legs swam in the air and the woman tumbled to the ground in a pile of purple cloth.

  She was, thank the Gods, unharmed. She stood immediately. Her headdress had come unwrapped and one of her small delectable breasts had burst free. Tahar smiled as he watched her struggle to cover herself, cursing the Red Land and everything in it.

  She was dusting herself off when the first arrow pierced the ground beside her. Another followed close behind, and if she had not had the awareness to get moving she would surely have been hit. Scanning the cliffs, he quickly found the arrows’ source—two men clad in the unmistakable blue linen of the King’s Guard.

  Tahar’s horse had now returned to his side, and he mounted it. ‘Khemetian filth!’ he yelled at the guards, and they momentarily ceased their shooting.

  Tahar barrelled towards them on his stallion. Now the guards had two targets to shoot for, and soon the arrows were flying in Tahar’s direction as well.

  Tahar rode unflinchingly towards the archers, catching one of their arrows in his saddlebag. He plucked a second arrow right out of the air with his hand. He changed direction, moving as unpredictably as he could, buying himself time enough to fashion his long rope into a large loop.

  The guards were dumbstruck when the rope encircled them. It yanked them to the ground like captured goats. Tahar swung out of the saddle and pulled the rope taut, so the men were pressed together, back to back. He wrenched their quivers and bows from their arms, broke one bow in half upon his knee, and placed the other on the ground beside him with the remaining arrows.

  ‘Your beast is no donkey,’ said a smooth, feminine voice from behind him. ‘And you are not a simple trader.’

  She was staring up at his horse in awe. How had he not noticed her there?

  ‘Nay, it is no donkey,’ Tahar said, keeping his eye on the guards.

  ‘What is it, then? It runs like a gazelle.’

  ‘The people of my tribe call it a horse.’

  ‘Your tribe? What tribe is that?’

  ‘The People of the Grass. From the lands beyond the Dark Sea.’

  The Khemetian guards stared up at their captors in confusion, and Tahar read their thoughts. Who was this Libu man whose tribe was named for a cow’s food? And who was this Libu woman who dressed like a man and spoke perfect Khemetian?

  ‘Look there!’ the woman exclaimed, pointing to a donkey lurking in the shade at the base of the cliffs.

  In minutes she had returned with the beast, and Tahar inspected its saddlebags. Inside there was water, a hunting knife and two sleeping carpets, but not a bit of food. Tahar studied the men. They appeared quite thin.

  ‘Your King has placed a reward on Libu heads, has he not?’ Tahar demanded. ‘That is why you hunt us?’

  ‘Aye,’ confessed the older of the two guards. ‘Finish us quickly,’ he urged, glancing at the dagger wedged in Tahar’s belt.

  The younger man’s lips were trembling.

  Tahar shook his head. He would not be a part of any more killing. He pulled out his dagger, but did not use it to cut any throat. Instead he cut off a large swathe of the woman’s headdress, fashioned it into a kind of sack, and filled it with grain from his own saddlebag.

  ‘I’m sorry that I cannot give you our heads,’ Tahar said, tying the sack closed, ‘but this purple cloth may be used as proof to collect your reward, and the grain it contains is worth its weight in copper.’

  He held up the heavy sack and placed it in the donkey’s saddlebag.

  ‘This is smoked addax,’ he explained to the men, retrieving a large palm leaf bundle from his horse’s pack. He tucked the addax in beside the sack of grain. ‘Together with the grain, the addax will be more than enough to sustain you on your journey back to Khemet,’ Tahar said. ‘Now, stand.’

  The two men pushed themselves to stand and Tahar slowly undid the rope.

  ‘You must go north before you go west,’ Tahar explained. ‘Keep to the oases and be wary of thieves.’

  Shock and confusion spread across the men’s sunken faces as Tahar bent to help them onto their beast. Securing them in their saddle, Tahar slapped the donkey on the rump.

  ‘Now, go,’ he said.

  As the beast ambled away the older man turned. ‘You have our thanks, Man of the Grass,’ he told Tahar. ‘Your kindness will not be forgotten.’

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘You gave them all our meat,’ the woman said, her eyes as big as plates.

  ‘That I did.’

  ‘But...it was meat.’

  ‘I took their arrows,’ explained Tahar. ‘I left them without the means to hunt.’

  ‘But they were trying to kill us.’

  ‘Ah, but they did not succeed. Come, let us take our rest at the pool.’ He placed his hand against the small of her back.

  Too exasperated to swat it away, she allowed him to guide her towards the oasis. ‘But—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘It was meat.’

  Tahar spoke as cryptically as he could, for her growing frustration was proving quite entertaining. ‘We will find more meat. Do not forget that I am now the owner of a fine bow.’

  ‘And the horse?’ she gasped, glancing back at the placid animal he led by the reins.

  ‘What about the horse?’ asked Tahar, hiding his grin.

  ‘How on earth did you learn to command such a beast?’

  Tahar closed his eyes, remembering his father’s towering figure. ‘My father taught me.’

  Tahar’s father had learned to command horses from Tahar’s grandfather, who had ridden the fleet-footed beasts across the steppes of their homeland, battling rival tribes and ransacking villages near the Dark Sea. When his grandfather had died, Tahar’s father had inherited both the old man’s battle axe and his restlessness—but not his lust for blood. Instead Tahar’s father had the ‘seeking sickness’—which was what Tahar’s mother had called her husband’s relentless curiosity about the world.

  ‘There’s so much more beyond this sea of grass, son,’ he had told Tahar. ‘We must see it for ourselves!’

  Tahar’s father had been fascinated by a land called Khemet, which he had heard lay beyond the Dark and Big Green Seas. ‘The Land of the Date-Eaters’, he had called the fabled kingdom. He’d told Tahar that the sun always shone in the Land of Khemet, and giant stone pyramids poked into the sky. At the kingdom’s heart was a city in which thirty thousand souls were said to reside. Thirty thousand souls! It was a land of untold wealth and prosperity—an earthly paradise where nobody ever went hungry and nobody ever died, or so his father had heard. His father had wished to journey to Khemet, and he’d wanted Tahar to join him.

  ‘The boy has scarcely seen a dozen years,’ Tahar’s mother had argued. ‘He may not go.’

  But Tahar’s father had insisted, explaining that the journey would make Tahar a man.

  Tahar remembered the soft, fragile sound of his mother’s voice when she had finally acquiesced. ‘Bring him back to me,’ was all she had said.

  ‘Aye, and a dozen gold coins to boot,’ Tahar’s father had pronounced, wrapping his shining copper battle axe in cloth. ‘We shall have no need of this but for trade,’ he explained,
and it had occurred to Tahar that his father was bold indeed, and that he loved the man more than all the stars in the sky.

  It was his father’s boldness, in the end, that had been his demise. They had sailed across the Dark Sea without incident, but his father had underestimated the moods of the Big Green. Or perhaps he’d wished to be tested, for as the storm had approached he’d refused to guide their old wooden sailing boat to land.

  ‘Let us see what the Khemetian Gods can conjure for the Men of the Grass,’ he had told Tahar. And he’d held his battle axe high in the air as the storm approached, as if the shiny copper weapon could somehow vanquish the immense waves.

  When they’d washed up on the shore the next day there had been no more boat—just Tahar, his father, and his father’s horse. Before them a sea of green-blue water had stretched into the distance; behind them a sea of sand. His father had told him that he was going to find help, that he wouldn’t be long.

  ‘Will you not take the horse?’ Tahar had asked, but his father had refused.

  ‘If I am not back in two days, come and find me,’ he’d said.

  But as Tahar had watched his father’s grand figure grow blurry in the heat haze he’d feared it was the last time he would ever see the beloved man...or his mother...or the distant grassy plains he called home.

  Now, with the boon of this woman, he would finally have the means to return to his homeland. All they had to do was survive the journey to Nubia. And survive they would—for, unlike his father, Tahar had been humbled by the Red Land, and his humility had gifted him the patience to learn its secrets.

  ‘There is our food,’ he remarked now, pointing to a large acacia bush. ‘Do you see it?’

  They had reached the area at the base of the cliffs where they had earlier tethered the horse. Confused, the woman bent beneath the bush and pushed her fingers into the sand, seizing upon a single seed.

  ‘There is but one—not enough to eat,’ she said, showing him the seed and then stuffing it into the folds of her wrap.