by Wilbur Smith
‘Huy!’ Lannon whispered in horror. ‘Why are you here? I left you resting with orders not to disturb you.’
‘At this time my place was with you.’
‘You should not have come,’ Lannon protested. This was beyond his planning. It was not part of it that Huy should witness the death of the witch. He had not intended torturing him with the deed. Wildly Lannon considered halting the ritual, withdrawing the sacrifice, ordering Huy to leave the temple.
Yet Lannon realized that the safety of the empire might be resolved in these next few moments. Could he halt the sacrifice, dare he risk antagonizing the goddess, was his duty to Huy greater than his duty to Opet, was it not already too late, had he not committed himself long ago to this path? Were the gods and demons mocking him now, could he not hear their hellish laughter echoing in the deserts of his soul?
Bewildered and appalled he stared at Huy, he took a step towards him, reaching out one hand in entreaty as though asking for understanding and forgiveness.
‘I need you,’ he said hoarsely, and Huy, not understanding, took the hand, thinking it the hand of friendship; proudly he smiled at his king and friend as he began to sing the offertory to the goddess.
His voice rose on eagle’s wings, flying up to the sacrificial platform in the roof of the cavern high above them. All the eyes in the temple turned upwards also and a tense expectant hush gripped the throng of worshippers
Tanith could not believe it was happening to her. When they had come to her cell in the dawn she thought it must be Huy come to fetch her away She had leapt from her couch and run to meet him.
It was not Huy but Sister Haka. They had taken her from the temple up the secret steps to the top of the cliffs above Opet. There in a stone building with a roof of thatch beside the sacrificial platform over the gaping hole above the pool of Astarte. They had dressed her in the rich embroidered robes of the sacrifice and put flowers in her hair.
Then they had draped her with the heavy gold chains, and bracelets, and leg bangles until Tanith felt she must collapse beneath the weight of them. She knew that this treasure formed part of the sacrifice, and that it was also intended to weigh her down swiftly into the green depths of the pool. The pool which had no bottom to it, the pool which would carry her to the bosom of the goddess.
Solemnly and in silence she was seated at the small banquet table, and her sister priestesses waited upon her, pressing her with choice foods and wines. It was the feast of farewell, the feast to someone who goes upon a journey. Tanith sipped a little of the wine, hoping that it might warm her icy spirit.
‘Huy,’ she thought. ‘Where are you, my love?’
At last a priestess came to the door and nodded to the others. There were fifteen of them, all strong young women, more than enough of them to overwhelm any resistance.
They closed in about where Tanith sat, not yet menacing but utterly determined. They looked down on her expressionlessly, their faces closed against pity or regret.
‘Come,’ said one of them, and Tanith stood up. They led her through the doorway into the sunlight, and ahead of her she saw the carved stone platform jutting out over the dark and gaping hole in the earth.
The path to the sacrificial platform was strewn with blossoms of the yellow mimosa tree, a flower sacred to the goddess. The scent was light and nostalgic on the warm still air, and the blossoms crushed beneath Tanith’s bare feet as she passed over them weighted down by her chains of gold, and the heaviness of her dread.
Suddenly she stopped, frozen at the sound of the voice issuing from the pit before her, a voice faint with distance and echoing strangely from the cavern walls; but the voice of such purity and beauty that she could not help but recognize it.
‘Huy!’ she whispered. ‘My lord!’ But the upwards flight of her spirits was short-lived, for the voice of Huy Ben-Amon was uplifted in the offertory of the sacrifice.
It was Huy who was sending her to the goddess, and in that moment a vision of hell and desolation opened before her. She found herself caught in the web of some monstrous conspiracy, not understanding it clearly, knowing only that Huy had deserted her. He was against her also. He was the one offering her to the goddess.
There was nothing to live for now. It was easy to take those last few steps up onto the platform.
As she paused on the brink she spread her arms in the sun sign and looked down into the gloom of the cavern. The waters of the pool were still and dark, and beside them stood the king and the priest.
They were looking up at her, but it was too far for her to judge their expressions. All she knew was that Huy’s voice was still raised in prayer, offering her to the goddess.
She felt hatred and anger replacing desolation, and she did not want to die with those emotions in her heart. To forestall them she swayed forward over the drop, over the deep green pool, and as she felt her balance go Huy’s voice stopped abruptly, cut off in the middle of a word.
Slowly she leaned out over the drop, and then suddenly she was in air, plunging downwards, hurtling towards the pool by the weight of gold she carried. As her stomach swooped within her she heard Huy’s voice again, raised in a shriek of despair as he called her name.
‘Tanith!’
She struck the surface of the pool with such force that all life was crushed from her, and the heavy ornaments plucked her beneath the limpid waters so swiftly that Huy saw only the brief gleam of gold deep down as though a great fish had turned upon its side to feed.
Manatassi crossed the great river in the winter of the Opet year 543. He used the cooler weather to carry his armies through the valley where the water was at its lowest levels. He crossed with three armies of varying sizes. The smallest, a mere 70,000 warriors, crossed in the west and overwhelmed the garrisons there. They drove swiftly for the western shores of the lake of Opet where the narrow waterway drained the lake and gave access to the ocean for the galleys of Opet. It was called the River of Life, the artery that fed the heart of Opet.
Manatassi’s impis severed the artery, freed the slaves employed at dredging the channel and slaughtered the garrison and slave-masters. Most of Habbakuk Lal’s fleet was drawn up on the beach careened for cleansing of the hulls. The galleys were burned where they lay and the sailors thrown alive on the fires.
Then Manatassi’s war captain blocked the channel. His warriors, and the tens of thousands of freed slaves tore down a small granite hill which stood beside the River of Life, and dumped it into the narrowest stretch of the river, rendering it impassable to any vessel larger than a canoe. This was a labour comparable with the construction of the great pyramid of Cheops, and it effectively sealed off the city and population of Opet from the outside world.
At the same time a second larger army crossed in the east, swept unhindered through the territory of the Dravs and burst like a black storm on the hills of Zeng.
The third and largest army, nearly three quarters of a million strong, surged across the river at Sett. Manatassi commanded them in person and he chose the crossing place as a gesture.
Marmon hurried to oppose him with his single legion of 6,000 men and was crushed in a swift and bloody battle. Marmon fled the field and died on his own sword amidst the burning ruins of Zanat.
Manatassi placed his centre across the road to Opet and rolled along it. His front was three miles wide and twenty deep, a multitude whose own bulk reduced the march to a stately progress.
Manatassi swept the land. He took no prisoner, neither man nor woman nor child. He took no loot, burning cloth and book and leather, smashing pot and cup, throwing it all upon the funeral pyre of a nation. The buildings he burned, and then threw down and scattered the hot stone slabs.
As his hatred fed upon this destruction so it seemed to grow, like the very flames he lit, it burned higher the more was heaped upon it.
The total fighting strength of Opet was nine legions. Of these one had died with Marmon in the north, and two others were hacked to pieces upon the terraces of
Zeng, the survivors holding out in a dozen besieged fortresses upon the crest of the hills.
With the remaining six legions Lannon Hycanus marched from Opet to meet Manatassi. They came together 150 miles north-east of Opet, and Lannon won a victory which gained him two miles of territory and one day’s respite - but which cost him 4,000 dead and wounded.
Bakmor, who commanded Legion Ben-Amon in the absence of the High Priest, came to Lannon’s tent upon the battlefield when the sky still glowed like a furnace from the cremation fires, and the stench of scorching flesh spoiled what little appetite for food that battle fatigue had left.
‘The enemy left 48,000 dead upon the field,’ Bakmor reported exultantly, and Lannon saw he was a young man no longer. How the years had sped away. ‘We took twelve for each of ours,’ Bakmor went on.
Lannon looked up at him, sitting on his couch while a physician dressed a minor wound in his arm, and he saw that dried sweat and blood had stiffened Bakmor’s hair and beard and that there were new lines and shadows in the handsome face.
‘How soon can you fight again?’ Lannon asked, and the shadows around Bakmor’s eyes deepened.
‘It was a hard day,’ he said. Legion Ben-Amon had held the centre firm during those desperate hours when it seemed the line must sunder at the pressure of black bodies and darting steel.
‘How soon?’ Lannon repeated.
‘In four or five days.’ Bakmor told him. ‘My men are weary.’
‘It will be sooner than that,’ Lannon warned him.
They fought again the following day, a battle as desperate and as costly as the other. Again Lannon won a heavy victory, but he could not hold the field and he must leave over a thousand of his wounded to the hyena and jackal while he fell back to a new defensive line of hills.
They fought again five days later, and five times more in the next seventy days. At the end of that time they were encamped twenty Roman miles from Opet, and Lannon’s six fine legions had shrunk to three.
It mattered not that they had won eight great battles, and that they had slain almost 200,000 of the enemy. For Zeng had fallen, only a handful of warriors winning through to describe its fate. The towns were burned and razed to the ground, the gardens cut down and burned also. The mines of the middle kingdom were destroyed, the slaves freed to join Manatassi’s horde and the shafts blocked with earth and rock.
The channel of the River of Life was choked with rock, there was no escape upon Habbakuk Lal’s galleys now, and from east and west new armies marched to reinforce Manatassi’s drive on Opet.
Despite the toll that Lannon had taken from the armies of Manatassi, they seemed unaffected in number or determination. Each time Lannon planted his standards and stood to dispute Manatassi’s advance, fresh hordes poured forward to attack him. Though he cut them down by the tens of thousands, they bled his own legions and left them each time more exhausted and with despair more deeply corroding their fighting spirit.
On the seventy-first day one full legion, 6,000 men, stabbed their officers in the night and scattered away into the darkness in small groups. Stopping only to pick up their women from the villages around Opet, they disappeared into the south.
Bakmor pursued them a short distance and dragged a hundred of them back in chains to face Lannon’s wrath. They were all men of mixed Yuye blood, one class above that of freed slave, the lowest type of citizen allowed the privilege of bearing arms for the king. It seemed they did not count the privilege dear. Made bold by the certainty of execution, their spokesman told the king:
‘If you had given us something to fight for, some station above that of dog, we might have stayed with you.’
Lannon had the man scalded to death with boiling water for his insolence, and retired his two remaining legions on the city.
They camped upon the lake shore without the city wall and Lannon looked to the north in the night and saw the bivouac fires of Manatassi’s army spread like a field of yellow Namaqua daisies upon the hills. Manatassi was pressing him hard.
Bakmor found the king on the outskirts of the camp, watching the enemy positions. He approached Lannon eagerly bearing the first good news they had received in many long days.
‘There is word of Huy Ben-Amon, Majesty.’ And Lannon felt a lift of his spirits.
‘Where is he? Is he alive? Has he returned?’ Lannon demanded. It was only now he admitted to himself how he had missed the little priest. He had not seen him since Huy had run out of the cavern of Astarte in the midst of the ceremony of the Fruitful Earth.
Although Lannon had conducted a diligent search, even offering a reward of 100 gold fingers for information about him, Huy had disappeared.
‘Has he returned?’ How many times in the long nights since then had Lannon longed for his companionship, his counsel and his comfort.
How often in the din of the battle had he listened for Huy’s cry ‘For Baal!’ and the song of the great axe.
How often had he wished that he could stiffen a crumbling centre or check a pivoting flank with the priest’s presence.
‘Where is he?’ demanded Lannon.
‘A fisherman saw him. He is out on the island,’ said Bakmor.
The days had drifted past in a haze of grief. Huy had lost count of them, one slid so easily into the next. Most of the time he spent working on the scrolls. He had brought all five of the golden books with him and when he was not in the hut he kept them buried beneath his sleeping mat.
He wrote exclusively of Tanith, of his love for her and her death. In the beginning he worked through the nights as well as the days, but then he used up the last of the oil for the lamp and he spent his nights wandering along the beach and listening to the low surf hiss and growl upon the sands, and the wind across the lake rattle the palm fronds.
He lived on the freshwater clams and a few fish that he took in the shallows, and he grew lean and unkempt; his beard and hair tangled and uncared for.
His grief showed in his eyes, making them wild and haunted, half mad and uncaring for anything but his own loss. Many of these hopeless days passed before anger and resentment began to work within him. From deep within him rose thoughts dark and dangerous as the shapes of killer sharks rising to the smell of blood.
Brooding over a smoky cooking fire he thought about his land and his gods. It seemed to him that both of them were cruel and greedy. A land devoted to the accumulation of wealth, counting not the toll in human suffering. Frivolous gods demanding the sacrifice, both of them greedy and devouring.
Huy left the fire and went down to the lake shore. He sat in the sand and the water ran up and tugged at his ankles before sliding back. The dark thoughts persisted, and mingled with them were the memories of Tanith.
He pondered the gods who would choose for the sacrifice the beloved of their faithful servant. What more did they demand of him, he wondered. He had given them everything he held dear, and still they wanted more.
How cruel that they should choose Lannon as the instrument to strip him of his love. He wished now that he could have told Lannon about Tanith. If Lannon had known of their love he would have protected her, Huy was sure of this. In the beginning he had hated Lannon, for it was he who had named Tanith as the sacrifice. Then reason had prevailed with Huy. He realized now that Lannon had acted in good faith. He had known nothing of Huy’s and Tanith’s relationship. He had known only that the nation was in dire danger and a valuable messenger was needed. Tanith was a natural choice then, reluctantly Huy saw that this was so, and knew that he would have done the same.
He no longer hated Lannon, but suddenly he found himself hating those who had forced him to it. The gods - the merciless gods.
Out of the lake great Baal rose in all his splendour of glittering gold and red, and across the waters he could see the rosy cliffs and towers of Opet glowing on the horizon.
From lifelong habit Huy rose to his feet and spread his arms in the sun sign, and he opened his mouth to sing the praise of Baal.
Suddenly he was shaking with anger. He felt fiery gusts of it rising through his soul, setting his hatred alight, the funeral fire on which his faith perished.
‘Damn you!’ he shouted. ‘What more do you want of me, you eater of flesh? How much longer must I be your plaything?’
Now his fists were clenched as he shook them in defiance at the rising sun, his face contorted and his tears streaming down into the wild bush of his beard. He walked forward into the lake.
‘How much longer must I feed your cruel appetite, man-killer? How many more innocents before you quench your monstrous lust for blood?’
He dropped to his knees in the wet sand, and the running waters surged about his waist.
‘I reject you!’ he shouted. ‘You and your bloodless mate. I want no more of you - I hate you. Do you hear me, I hate you! ’
Then he fell silent, and bowed his head. The water surged softly about him and after a while he scooped handfuls of it and washed his face. Then he rose and walked back to the hut above the beach. He felt a sense of fateful release, the peace which follows an irrevocable decision. He was priest no longer.
He ate a piece of smoked fish and drank a bowl of lake water, before he began work on the scrolls.
Again he wrote of Tanith, trying to recall every tone of her voice, every smile and frown, the way she laughed, and the way she held her head - as though he could give her immortality in words, as though he could give her life for the next 1,000 years in words cut into a sheet of imperishable gold.
Once he looked up from the scroll with peering shortsighted eyes and saw that the day was passing, and the long shadows of the palms cast tiger-stripes upon the yellow sands of the beach. He stooped again to the scroll and worked on.
There was the crunch of a footstep in the sand outside the hut, and a dark shape blocked out the light.
