by Tom Pollack
“Monsignor Notombo! Call the airport and ask them to clear a helicopter for us immediately!”
CHAPTER 22
The Nile River, circa 2630 BC
“ONE MORE GAME, SIR?”
“Are you sure you wish to risk another defeat, Captain Nakht?” Cain chuckled, as he rolled the knucklebone dice and then placed his marker firmly on the board’s opening square. The two men were passing time as the massive barge and its hundreds of crew members floated slowly down the Nile. They had picked up their precious cargo weeks ago, a single four-sided piece of stone weighing more than a large herd of cattle. The obelisk was hewed from the rock quarry in Aswan and loaded by over a thousand men using rollers and levers. Cain was hired to deliver the pillar of red granite to one of the pharaoh’s temples downriver.
Cain and his young captain were engrossed in yet another game of senet, perhaps the most popular diversion in all of Egypt. From the pharaoh to the peasantry, senet was a universal distraction. Like almost everything in Egypt, the board game was bound up with religion, holding the status of a ritual for at least some players. Successful senet fanciers like Cain were widely thought to enjoy the protection of the gods. With its grid-like panels of thirty squares, arranged in three rows of ten, the senet board and its ornate playing tiles were talismanic objects, often placed in graves so that the deceased could indulge during the afterlife.
As Captain Nakht contemplated his own opening move, Cain’s thoughts drifted. The brilliant rays of a late afternoon sun sparkled on the Nile, where a northerly breeze helped to moderate the heat. He had now traversed the river more than a thousand times. His original investment, supplied by Menes’s stake, had multiplied handsomely. He was currently the owner of a dozen barges for the transportation of heavy stones. These were much in demand for building pyramids, the latest fashion in funerary monuments. The vessels also had the capacity to handle the much larger stones from which obelisks were crafted to adorn the pharaoh’s temples.
In addition to his trading successes, Cain felt pleased that his strategy to avoid detection of his longevity was working. His routine seldom varied. He would choose a commercially promising river port as his base, remaining there for five years or so—just enough time to familiarize himself with the community and to garner profitable trading contacts. Much of this time would be spent in river transit, however.
Cosmetics proved an indispensable tool in maintaining the charade, and Cain often blessed the name of Layla, now long dead. Another ruse he occasionally employed was the impersonation of his own sons after prolonged absence from a port. If he felt that discovery of his secret was likely, he would simply move to another base on the river, taking care not to return to any community where people might be still alive to recognize him. Before each relocation, he would arrange for a trusted servant to implement a long-term trust agreement for the maintenance of family members and for the administration of his business interests.
For Cain, family relationships presented some of the most troubling aspects of his curse, much as he anticipated when Layla first became pregnant. Although his kinships in Egypt afforded a welcome contrast to the abject loneliness of the desert oasis, his ability to bond with wives and children suffered in numerous ways. His length of years brought the inevitable grief of the deaths of generation after generation of loved ones, and he felt himself becoming increasingly callous over the centuries. Moreover, there could be no real intimacy with relatives whom he was presently misleading and ultimately abandoning.
Cain found that his life had hollowed into something like a game of senet, where successfully maneuvering within its required elements of strategy, deceit, and blind luck brought him at least some satisfaction. At the same time, however, if his life was like a game it could never quite be normal—and he wondered at what point would he finally lose.
After besting Nakht, Cain looked up and saw they were nearing their destination. He stood up and motioned for the captain to follow. They walked the length of the barge to ensure the preparations for arrival were complete. Reaching the base of the obelisk at the far end of the vessel, they noticed a young crewman staring at a narrow, horizontal rectangle Cain had chiseled into the base of the stone several days earlier.
“Have you never seen a shipper’s mark before, my friend?” Cain asked.
“Oh, yes sir,” answered the startled sailor. “But I cannot make out the inscription on this one. It doesn’t look like any hieroglyph I know. May I ask its meaning?”
Cain paused for a moment, noticing that other nearby ears had pricked up, awaiting his response.
“In my travels far and wide, I have encountered many languages and writing systems,” he replied cryptically. “But this is no time for a translation lesson. Look, we are nearing port. Now, all of you, prepare to unload our cargo!”
Weeks after delivering the obelisk, Cain stopped in at Abydos on the way back to his base in Thebes. Menes had been born here, and fittingly enough, it was in Abydos that he was buried. Although Cain did not adhere to Egyptian religious beliefs, he made a tomb offering for his patron out of respect, in accordance with standard practice.
But his visit had a more commercial purpose as well. Ever since uprooting from Memphis, he had pondered the entrepreneurial potential of beer manufacturing. Like senet, beer was a universal feature of Egyptian life. It was the beverage of choice for nobles and farmers alike. To Cain, however, beer brewing in Egypt seemed curiously backward and cumbersome. For one thing, it was regarded as women’s work, confined to individual households. Closely linked to the baking of bread, the brewing of beer was a domestic task which, given the ubiquity of the beverage, cried out for economies of scale. In addition, never forgetting the bitter brew he’d managed to choke down during his first interview with Menes, Cain thought the product itself could be considerably more refined.
So his time in Abydos was largely devoted to locating a suitable site for the beer factory he was contemplating. Rather than acquiring land in the town, he decided early on that he should build the brewery by the riverside, taking advantage of abundant water and easy transport facilities. After all, this would be a factory not just for Abydos and its environs, but for distributing beer to all of Egypt.
After several weeks, he found an ideal site for the factory and its requisite grain storage and docking facilities. Negotiations with the landowner bore fruit, and Cain signed a contract to purchase a two-hundred-acre riverfront tract. From local fishermen he obtained detailed descriptions of the river’s levels and currents in that locale. Much work lay ahead, but the foundations for his new enterprise had been laid.
It was now the beginning of the planting season, and Cain intended to depart from Abydos for his home in Thebes. He missed being with his local wife and his three young sons after several months of absence, and he longed for some relaxation from river plying and constant business activities.
Yet he lingered in Abydos long enough to witness the municipal festival in honor of the god Osiris. This deity, whose cult was starting to gather momentum throughout Egypt, was widely worshipped as the lord of the dead. He was also the god who, according to local legend, had taught the Egyptians how to make beer.
Osiris was the subject of a detailed mythology, at the center of which was the tale of his murder by his jealous brother Set, the god of evil. Coveting Orisis’s throne, Set had killed his sibling and carved his body into many pieces, scattering the gory fragments all over Egypt. Osiris’s grieving sister and consort, Isis, searched for the body and reassembled its parts, whereupon Osiris was miraculously resurrected. Because the heart of Osiris was believed to have been deposited in Abydos, the city developed a special veneration for the deity. And every year, the theatrical performances presented at the festival dramatized the life-death-rebirth cycle of the myth.
From the back row, Cain watched the dramas in the town’s open-air theater with a mixture of fascination and mounting anxiety. The memories reawakened by this primordial story tempted hi
m to abandon the spectacle, yet he couldn’t tear himself away. The notion that here in Egypt, of all places, fratricide was intimately bound up with the human condition struck a dissonant chord in Cain. Several thousand spectators cheered and applauded at the end of each play, but Cain felt racked by anguish and alienation.
Back aboard his vessel, long after midnight, Cain fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. But toward dawn, some intuition woke him with a start. Had the anchor chain given way? No, the barge was sound. A last-quarter moon glimmered on the Nile, whose waters were calm.
A familiar voice materialized out of the shadows.
“You still think of your brother, Cain?” asked the master of spirits.
Cain was silent for some time. He decided to parry one question with another.
“Where is Abel, spirit? Is he like Osiris, in the afterlife?”
“Abel sleeps well. You will find him again when you finally have the courage to end your own life.”
He was angered by the spirit’s reference to his fateful invitation at the cliffside oasis.
“You saw what happened. I saved a life, rather than taking one.”
“And you expected some kind of reward, but instead received only more of the same curse. Restless wandering up and down the river without end. You merely exchanged the lonely sands for even lonelier waters. I am the only reason you live well in Egypt, enjoying great wealth, but without power’s hazards and its obligations.”
“You do not know the memories that gnash at me, spirit. I bid you depart!”
“Yes, Cain, the memories. I will leave you now. But the memories—they are yours forever.”
A predawn mist drifted over the river. Cain had sat bolt upright during the conversation, but now he sagged backward, exhausted.
He feared the memories would always torture him.
CHAPTER 23
The Nile River, circa 1400 BC
THE YEARS WHEELED AROUND for Cain, mounting into decades and generations. His trading as a river merchant flourished, ably aided by successive ship captains. He acquired lands under many different aliases in every district of Egypt. Though a stranger to the courts of power, his many names were known by the pharaohs of every dynasty. His pathway to material success in his adopted country met no obstruction. Cain was, if anything, an advertisement for the beneficent prosperity of pharaonic rule and the dominance of Egypt in the known world.
The brewery eventually became a triumphant success. After centuries of trial and error, Cain perfected a two-part process that produced a more refined beverage than Egypt had ever consumed before. Instead of lightly baked bread as the main ingredient, Cain used bread made from emmer wheat and slightly flavored with coriander, dates, and figs. This base, in turn, was combined with barley and yeast, and the medley was then fermented. The beer that resulted was golden-hued and slightly cloudy, but filtering and straining rendered it almost translucent. Egyptians, headed by the royal family, loved the new taste, and grain payments flowed ever more generously into Cain’s silos up and down the river.
Yet, no amount of wealth seemed to satiate Cain, so he immersed himself in plans for the brewery’s expansion. Calling in his supervisors, he reviewed a set of drawings that would enable the plant to triple production within a year. The market seemed inexhaustible. Cain hoped to ship his product overseas as well, perhaps to ports as distant as the island of Crete.
The construction of new warehouses, silos, copper fermentation tanks, and lifting cranes proceeded apace. Then, one evening just before sunset, Cain found himself on the loading dock, discussing personnel issues with his foreman, Sapra. While he was away on one of his many trips, some of his laborers had recently defected to take work with a rival grain merchant named Horus. This man, now nearing sixty and notorious for nursing long-standing grudges, regarded Cain as an upstart. Although these defections involved only a small minority of the employees, Cain inquired if Sapra had been able to determine the causes.
“Horus is fiercely envious of your success, sir,” replied the foreman. “He spreads ugly rumors that you are not even an Egyptian. His resentment has rubbed off on some of the workers, I’m afraid.”
As Cain paused to absorb this news, a strange sight presented itself. A medium-sized barge was swiftly approaching from upriver, seemingly laced with tongues of fire. At first he thought it was some kind of optical illusion, or a reflection of the flame-like rays of the setting sun. Yet as the vessel drew steadily closer, both men could see she was loaded with an immense mound of burning refuse, fanned even more briskly now by an early evening breeze on the river.
“A fire ship!” shouted Sapra. “Quickly, sir, we must summon the entire staff to help! If she hits the dock, the brewery will burn!”
But it was too late. Cain and Sapra jumped clear in time, but the rogue barge, as if guided by a diabolical hand, crashed into the loading dock, soon triggering a deafening explosion in the nearest grain silo. As workers ran in all directions, Cain and Sapra were knocked backward to the ground by the force of the blast. Both were burned on their face, arms, and chest. Cain helped his superintendent off the flaming pier and was forced to watch his cherished investment consumed in the inferno. It had all happened so quickly that Cain struggled to comprehend the malice that had reduced most of his brewery to a charred ruin. This enterprise was his most thorough attempt yet to work around God’s curse of the ground. It seemed his maker would grant him no such reprieve.
By dint of some heroic firefighting, Cain, Sapra, and the rest saved about a quarter of the brewery. The consensus was that the sabotage was the work of Horus. But nothing could be proved. The fire ship, itself destroyed, was of untraceable origin.
Meanwhile, Cain grimly accounted for the casualties. Several dozen of his workers, trapped inside exploding silos, had been killed, and compensation would have to be paid to their families. Cain himself, as well as Sapra, had suffered additional severe burns as they fought the flames, and many staffers were similarly injured. Luckily, the salves and herbs available in Abydos sufficed to alleviate the pain.
But in the midst of such travails, he overlooked the risk that now, willy-nilly, he was running. After Cain’s burns healed within a week, the regeneration of his skin was impossible to conceal, even with cosmetics and bandages. Sapra and the others bristled; perhaps Horus had been right about Cain after all. What had been a series of murmurs against Cain became a chorus of angry shouts.
Reluctantly, he left Abydos behind.
CHAPTER 24
Abu Simbel, Egypt, circa 1255 BC
CAIN THOUGHT THAT HE had never seen a more splendid procession in all his centuries in Egypt. It was the first day of the heb-sed festival of Ramesses II, the public celebration of the pharaoh’s continuing vitality after thirty years of rule. While Cain had attended many such festivals before, for most Egyptians the sed jubilee was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Thousands of cheering spectators packed the riverside esplanade in Thebes, where the principal rituals of the festival would unfold.
The sed festival had ancient origins, he recalled. Pharaoh Djoser, for whom the Step Pyramid was completed in 2611 BC, celebrated such a jubilee, as did most of his longer reigning successors. But the first sed of Ramesses II outdid all its precursors in lavish pomp and splendor. The traditional religious rituals and narratives had been firmly reestablished. The priesthood of Amun-Re again had deep roots among the nation’s elite. Now more than ever, the pharaoh embodied the secular dominion of the state with the majesty of a god on earth.
As the priestly procession made its way around the perimeter of the esplanade, Cain noted with satisfaction that his friend Khaimudi had been promoted to the ranks of the high priesthood. The special insignia on his robe, as well as his presence in the front ranks of the procession, testified to Khaimudi’s new eminence. He had met the priest shortly after reinstalling himself in Thebes three years prior. Several days before the festival, Cain, who now called himself Senejer, received a message from his friend urging him to
attend the opening ceremonies so that Khaimudi could present him with a special request. He wondered what his priestly friend had in mind. The two met that evening near the Red Chapel.
“Why did you not inform me of your promotion?” Cain asked.
His friend shrugged. “I am a religious man, not a merchant. Boasting is frowned upon.”
Cain chuckled. “I think we have more in common than you realize, O holy one,” he teased. “But, that aside, what is this request that brings us together this evening?”
Khaimudi placed his hands on Cain’s shoulders, his features bearing an uncharacteristically earnest expression.
“First I must have your vow of silence. No one outside the highest ranks at court knows what I am about to disclose to you.”
“You have my word.”
Khaimudi glanced over his shoulder to ensure they were alone. “Well, then, are you acquainted with the site of Abu-Simbel? It lies on the western shore of the Nile in Nubia, some 175 miles southwest of Aswan.”
Cain nodded.
“Ramesses wishes to build a colossal temple there. Two temples, actually. One shrine will celebrate his mightiness, and the second will glorify his beloved wife Nefertari. The temples will be literally carved out of the mountainside. Preliminary estimates call for a construction period of twenty years. Who knows if he will live that long, the sed notwithstanding. But that is not my chief concern at the moment.”
“Then what worries you?”
“The Mighty One has charged the high priesthood with the task of devising an unprecedented plan for the main temple. Of course, the construction serves the ends of propaganda, both religious and national. We want the Nubians to know that it is fruitless for them to challenge Egypt’s power. But Ramesses has another motive as well. He wishes this temple to surpass all others ever built in Egypt. It must not only be distinctive—it must be unique.”
