Take us to water, and you can have this.
The strangers chattered again. Then they began to smile.
It wasn’t much of an oasis. A stand of date palms, their tops shaggy and dusty from the wind. The feathery leaves of tamarisk trees, shading a wrinkle of water forced to the surface by the band of rock that reared up through the sand, forming a slight cliff to one side. But it was enough for them all to drink deeply.
There was dried camel dung around the waterhole, which meant they had fuel for a fire. Portho twirled two sticks together to get a spark onto this tinder, then Nitho tended the flames, setting a pot of the barley they’d brought from Thinis, mixed with cumin and dried onions and a little of the pool’s water, in the hot sand by the fire, but not too close to the heat, so the pot wouldn’t crack. The sand warriors contributed to the feast too, with a hare and a hyena that they’d speared earlier that day.
It was the first time Narmer had ever eaten hyena. The meat was bitter, and he had to force himself to pretend it was delicious.
The Trader smiled at him across the glowing camel droppings. ‘The People of the Sand believe that hyena meat is good for aching joints.’
‘Is it?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘How do they live in this wilderness?’ murmured Narmer. ‘Just sand and puddles of water…’
The Trader raised an eyebrow. ‘They are your enemies yet you don’t know how they live?’
Narmer flushed.
‘They live as most people live,’ said the Trader. ‘But it takes more land for them to do it. You hunt in a small space by the River. They hunt from waterhole to waterhole. They pick dates at one spot, and manna from the tamarinds in another…’
‘Manna?’
‘Tiny animals suck the sap from the trees, and give out a thick white honey on the trees every morning in midsummer. The People of the Sand have learnt to read the desert. They follow foxes or hares or pigeons to water. When the rains come, the jackals and hyenas lead them to high ground away from the floods.’
Narmer watched the men across the fire, chewing the hyena bones they held in their left hands and scooping up the barley mash with the fingers of their right hands. ‘Why do they attack Thinis, then, if they have such a good life in the desert?’
‘Because their world is growing drier,’ replied the Trader. ‘Springs that gave water a year ago are empty now.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Narmer. ‘Nitho said you had never met these people before!’
‘But I have met other People of the Sand,’ said the Trader calmly. ‘And people who have met the People of the Sand. The world has more links than you may have guessed.’
The People of the Sand wrapped themselves in their camel-skin cloaks that night to sleep. But Narmer stayed awake. The Trader had said that it was a tradition of the People of the Sand that any man they had eaten with was a friend, yet Narmer still preferred to stay on guard.
In the end nothing happened. The strangers left before dawn, taking their precious ointment with them, striding off into the desert as though it were as familiar to them as the Royal Courtyard back home was to Narmer—which he supposed in a way it was. For a moment he wondered where they were headed, who they were planning to attack. To another oasis, like this one, but with children playing by the water? Or even to join with others and raid Thinis? But there was nothing he could do about it now.
Nitho called out to Bast, who had kept her distance from the oasis. Narmer had been grateful for it: one of them might have speared her in terror—or, worse, the cat might have attacked them.
Narmer watched as Nitho hugged the great animal and gave her a bird she’d snared at the pool. And then they too left, heading southeast across the desert.
CHAPTER 14
The days passed slowly, days of sand and heat. They brought growing satisfaction for Narmer. For at last the Trader began to talk to him, sometimes striding beside his chair, or sitting beside him in the quiet of the night before the fire.
Had the Trader been waiting for Narmer to learn Sumerian? Or had Narmer passed some kind of test when he bargained with the Sand People? Whichever it was, Narmer drank in the new knowledge as though it were cool water from a spring.
The Trader used the sun to guide them, it seemed, and now before they slept each night he showed Narmer how to use the stars for guidance too, while the cat purred on Nitho’s feet and the guards snored. The Trader explained how a traveller must keep looking behind him, so he’d remember what the view looked like in that direction, in case he ever needed to return.
There were other lessons too, like how to watch the way the land rose and fell, to work out where water might be seeping. There were stories about strange lands and even stranger people, which Narmer realised were meant to teach as well as entertain, like the tale of the afreet at that long-ago feast back in Thinis.
Each day his walking grew easier. His feet toughened and became calloused by the hot sand. His face and hands darkened to the colour of a bread crust, and his cheeks lost their softness.
Hunger gnawed at him like a jackal with fresh bones, not for food—their supplies were enough to keep them fed—but for familiar food, cucumbers and radishes and catfish.
And then the sand wind came.
It started as a red haze, spreading across the dawn horizon soon after they left camp. The Trader noticed it first. He muttered something to the others, too fast for Narmer to understand the Sumerian.
Narmer had been limping along, proud of how well he could walk now. But suddenly the Trader barked an order. The porters put down the chair for him to climb onto.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked Nitho.
‘Look at the sky,’ she said abruptly. ‘Get on the chair. Hurry! The porters can carry you much faster than you can walk.’
The porters lifted his chair and broke into a jog.
Narmer looked where Nitho had pointed. ‘A sandstorm,’ he observed. He was used to sandstorms at home: hours or days when the sky wept sand that crept into every crevice, so that the women had to spend days sweeping it from floors and pathways. It was going to be uncomfortable being in one out here, he thought, without any shelter but the tents. ‘But why are we hurrying?’
Nitho didn’t look at him. Her face seemed blank, as though there were no time for emotion now. All her strength now seemed to be caught in keeping up with the porters and the Trader with her limping stride. ‘Because if we are caught in it, we die.’
The first gusts of sand were stinging their eyes when they came to a rock.
It wasn’t a very big rock. It poked out of the endless flat land as though a giant bird had been carrying it and had dropped it among the sand. But the others seemed to welcome it as though it were a palace with open doors.
The porters began to put up the biggest of the tents in the side of the rock that would be sheltered from the wind. But this time they tied all the tent poles except one together to make one long pole, then draped the tent skins over them. The narrow, too-tall tent looked weird to Narmer, but he didn’t want to interrupt them with questions. At last they hammered a final pole into the sand next to the tent, and tied half the baggage onto it.
‘Inside,’ ordered the Trader briefly.
Narmer crawled into the tent. There was just enough room for all of them to crouch together with the rest of the luggage. Even the cat was crammed half onto Nitho’s lap and half onto his.
Had Narmer ever sat with other people crowded about him like this? Smelling their breath, their sweat? Not that he could remember. No one crowded a prince. But he was a prince no longer. And out here, he realised, the desert didn’t care who was king and who was commoner.
Then the wind hit them.
Suddenly Narmer understood the full truth of Nitho’s words. The hills of Thinis protected it from the full force of the sandstorms that raged across the desert. But out here the wind meant death.
‘If you were outside the tent,’ said the Trader, his voice pitc
hed high over the growl around them, ‘the wind would eat the flesh from your bones. Or it would suffocate you, bury you in sand. Your body would dry in its sandhill till the end of time.’
‘But we’re safe in the tent?’
‘No,’ said the Trader. ‘But we may survive.’
That day passed in a blur for Narmer. One day? Or was it more? The wind yelled about the tent. The sand lashed and buffeted. At times it seemed as though the sand were a living thing, prowling round the tent, trying to feast on the puny humans inside.
Together they held down the edges of the tent against the tugging of the wind. And then there was no need to hold it down, for the sand outside held it down instead.
The heat was unbearable. But the unbearable still has to be borne. The air grew stale, stinking of sweat and fear and cat. Even in the desert’s dryness it turned moist and clammy from their breath.
And now there was a new danger. For as the sand about them grew higher it threatened to collapse their tent. They could only press their backs against the goatskin, gulping mouthfuls of water in the fetid darkness, bumping at each other’s limbs, or the cat’s, pinching each other to keep themselves awake so they would keep pushing against the sand that was trying to drown them.
Narmer’s mouth grew dry, as though the wind and sand were sucking every scrap of moisture from his body. His tongue swelled. His lips cracked. His skin felt like old leather left out in the sun to dry.
And the beast outside kept screaming.
An endless nightmare later, Narmer felt Nid try to stand. He seemed to be lifting a pole upwards.
‘What is it?’ Narmer’s tongue was so swollen that the words were slurred.
‘Too much sand on top of us,’ muttered Nid, ‘blocking the air hole at the top. Without air we die.’ He moved the pole again. ‘I’m trying to clear the blockage.’
Did it work? Narmer supposed it must have. Because he kept on breathing, kept on living…
He must have slept, sitting upright, crammed against the others. Or perhaps time just blurred to nothing.
And finally, so gradually it was hard to say when it happened, the wind began to die away.
Narmer glanced at Nitho. He could just make out her eyes in the dimness, but he caught the movement as she nodded.
‘The storm is easing,’ said the Trader hoarsely.
‘How long…’ Narmer’s voice ended in a croak.
‘Soon,’ answered the Trader.
He was right. With each passing moment the sound of the wind grew quieter, as though it were a desert animal that had simply walked away.
The Trader passed the water bag around again, as though to celebrate. Narmer felt the warm water soothe the dry ache in his throat. It was almost as if he could feel it flooding into the dry, cramped reaches of his body.
And at last there was silence, broken only by their breathing and a hiss from Bast. A heavier, denser silence than Narmer had even known.
‘Time to leave,’ said the Trader softly. ‘If we can. No, stay still,’ he told Narmer, who was about to move. ‘The sand can still kill us.’
Nid and Portho rose and stood together, their backs still pressed against the goatskin to stop the sand from collapsing on them all. Then slowly, very slowly, Nid climbed up on Portho’s shoulders. He pushed at the roof of the tent to open it.
A wave of sand slithered down on top of them. Narmer choked, instinctively shutting his eyes. Bast hissed. Sand…and more sand…around Narmer’s feet, his legs, up to his waist…
And then it stopped. And when Narmer looked up again, there was the sky, high and still, blue and safe above them, as Nid and Portho pushed through the sandhill around them to force a way out.
They had survived.
CHAPTER 15
Bast leapt out next, climbing over the humans with her rough paws as though they were a convenient set of mountains to scale. Nitho and the Trader climbed out after her. Portho leant down and helped Narmer clamber awkwardly up the piled sand and out of the tent. The fresh air was sweet as honey, soft as milk.
He grinned at Nitho. But she wasn’t looking at him. She and the others were frantically digging down into the sand where they had left their luggage.
Narmer looked around him in disbelief. The rock they’d camped by had vanished. How had so much been carried off by the wind?
He limped over to help them, while the cat shook herself and began to wash.
At least the sand was easy to shift. But there was no sign of the pole that held down their baggage. For a moment Narmer wondered if they were digging in the right place, but then Nid’s hands uncovered a piece of broken wood. The pole had snapped in the wind.
No one said anything. They redoubled their efforts, pushing and heaving at the sand. Suddenly Nitho gave a cry. There were the two large packs, still safe in their goat hide, tied to the bottom of the pole. But the smaller pack that the Trader had carried was gone.
Narmer sat back. ‘Not much lost.’ Then he saw the expressions of the others. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘The small pack contained the gold,’ said Nitho briefly.
‘But…but can’t we find it?’
Nitho gestured at the sand, which continued unbroken to the horizon. ‘Where? It must have been blown away when the pole snapped. It could be anywhere. We might dig all our lives and it would still be lost.’
Narmer stared at her, then at the Trader. What did this mean? What happened to traders who had nothing to trade? Poor people in Thinis lived on what they could glean from others’ fields, hunting for fallen grain on the ground, begging and living on dried fish and papyrus stems. It had never occurred to him that one day he might be poor too.
‘Don’t you have gold at home?’ he asked hopefully.
‘No,’ said the Trader briefly. ‘A trader’s wealth is in the goods he carries. We carried riches to Thinis, and left with more riches: the gold. Now we have none.’
No one said anything. Narmer gazed at the world of sand about him. What had he done? Left a life of comfort for poverty…starvation?
And then he looked over at Nitho. She seemed concerned, but not devastated. Nor were the porters beating their chests in despair.
Bast yawned, and nosed curiously at one of the packs.
The Trader gazed into the desert, lost in thought. Finally he turned back to Narmer and Nitho, and smiled.
‘So,’ he said, ‘Thinis’s gold was not the fortune that the Oracle said I’d find. But we can still trade in Punt.’
‘How?’ demanded Narmer. ‘…Sir,’ he added.
‘The Queen does all Punt’s trading herself. I have traded with her many times. She will trust me, I think. She’ll loan us myrrh to trade for copper and turquoise in Ka’naan, knowing we will repay her. We won’t make the fortune on this trip that I hoped.’ His smile grew wider. ‘But it could be worse. We have water, and grain enough to feed us and to pay our way to Punt. And even better…’
‘What?’ asked Narmer.
The Trader’s dark eyes looked at him from their pillows of wrinkles. ‘We are alive.’
And finally they came to the sea.
Narmer had heard of the sea. Travellers called it ‘the Great Blue’. But he’d never quite believed in it. Water that stretched to the horizon…
But now that he was here it was strangely disappointing. It wasn’t blue at all, more a sort of rippling greenish grey. And the shore was barren, despite all the water. He had expected to walk from desert into greenery, just like back home, where you walked from the red desert to the black moist soil that supported plants and birds and towns.
But here the desert stretched right down to the water, apart from a few cubits of rocky beach along the edge. The only signs of greenery were a cluster of palms and tamarisk trees near a huddle of stone huts, which looked as if someone had just piled rocks together and hoped that they’d give shelter.
Nitho saw the expression on his face and laughed up at him in his chair. ‘What were you expecting? Another Thin
is? There aren’t any big towns along this coast!’
Narmer flushed. ‘Why don’t the people here grow things with all this water? They don’t even have a patch of onions!’
‘Because it’s salt,’ said Nitho matter-of-factly. ‘Didn’t you know that the seas are salt?’
‘Salt?’
‘Taste it,’ said the Trader calmly, watching Narmer with a small smile on his face.
The porters lowered Narmer’s chair. He forced himself to his feet and limped awkwardly down to the water. He took a mouthful of seawater and immediately spat it out. ‘It’s disgusting! Not even fish could live in this!’
‘They do, you know,’ the Trader told him. ‘But they’re different sorts of fish from the ones in your river. Salt water won’t grow plants either, nor can animals drink it.’
‘Then what do the people here drink?’
‘There’s a freshwater spring by those rocks. That’s why they built their houses here. They live on fish and dates, and people pay them to use their boats.’
Narmer put his hand up to shield his eyes from the sea’s glare and searched the horizon. ‘Which boats?’
‘The men are out fishing now,’ explained Nitho. ‘But when they come in we’ll ask them to sail to Punt to ask a captain to bring a ship here to pick us up.’
‘Why can’t we go in their fishing boats?’
‘Because they have only two or three small boats here. They’d have to make several trips to fit us all in, with our baggage too. But a large ship from Punt can carry us all.’
Ships that could carry thirty men…Narmer remembered when Nitho had first told him of such big ships. It seemed like a lifetime ago. ‘Why do we have to go by ship at all? Why can’t we just keep walking down to Punt?’
The Trader and Nitho exchanged a glance. Narmer hated it when they did that. It made him feel ignorant, and an outsider.
‘The Nubian lands are just south of here,’ explained the Trader, gesturing to the porters to set the tents up further down the shore.
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