The Crocodile Tomb

by Michelle Paver

  Hylas dropped behind a bush and drew his knife.

  He didn’t have to wait long. A pack of dogs went hurtling after the antelope. As they sped past, Hylas took in their coarse red fur and collars of spiked bronze. Hunting dogs. He had time to think, warriors – then there they were, a band of half-naked men following their hounds at a disciplined run amid clouds of dust.

  They were almost out of sight when the last man ran back and stooped to examine the sand not ten paces from where Hylas hid.

  The warrior was stocky and muscular, and his reddish-brown limbs were ridged with battle-scars. Despite the scorching sand, his feet were bare, and he wore nothing but a kilt of heavy linen, covered by rawhide webbing. His black hair was cut to shoulder-length, with a fringe across the brow. Though he had no beard, his face was as rough as a desert crag, and the charcoal bars daubed beneath his eyes gave him a stony, inhuman look. He carried a longbow and a wovengrass quiver of arrows, a hefty spear and a large curved bronze knife. On a thong about his neck hung five shrivelled human ears.

  Hylas felt sick. Something Kem had said came back to him. They get paid for each kill they can prove. Hylas pictured the warrior hacking off an ear as proof, then leaving the corpse for the jackals …

  Someone touched his arm, and he nearly cried out. It was Pirra, her eyes wide and dark.

  Together they watched the warrior straighten up and scan his surroundings.

  One of his comrades ran back and said something in Egyptian. The first man rapped out one word. His comrade blenched. Together, they ran off to join the others.

  ‘Did you understand any of that?’ breathed Hylas when they’d gone.

  ‘Lion,’ she whispered. ‘They must have found Havoc’s tracks.’

  Hylas swallowed. ‘Will they come after her?’

  ‘I don’t think so, only the Perao is allowed to hunt lions.’

  ‘But if they find out we’re here, they’ll come after us. Where’s Kem?’

  She tossed her head in disgust. ‘Gone!’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘He was ahead of me, he shot across the gap and into the reeds. I was about to follow when the dogs appeared –’

  ‘Well then maybe he didn’t know you’d got left behind.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he come back? Face it, Hylas, he’s gone. It’s just as I expected. He led us to a border patrol, then fled.’

  Hylas didn’t want to believe it, but Kem was certainly gone. Now what to do? Ahead of them, the reeds rustled and creaked, exhaling a swampy, rotten smell. Hylas thought of cobras and crocodiles, and the river horses which Kem had said could bite a man in half.

  ‘We’ll have to risk it,’ said Pirra in a low voice. ‘We can’t stay out here, they might come back.’

  Hylas gave a reluctant nod.

  Cutting off a thorn bough to brush away their tracks, he checked that there was no one in sight. Then, hand in hand, they sped across the sand and plunged into the Great Green.

  ‘Hylas, where are you?’

  ‘Over here.’

  ‘Where? I can’t –’

  ‘I’m coming.’ He squeezed through a clump of stiff green stems, and back to Pirra.

  ‘We need to stay together,’ she muttered angrily.

  ‘I thought we were, it sounded like you were right behind!’

  ‘Well I wasn’t, I was nowhere near!’ In the shifting light, her small pointed face had a greenish tinge, and her crinkly black hair clung damply to her shoulders. He thought she looked like a water spirit. A frightened one.

  Together, they squelched through the dim green tunnel that snaked through the reeds. It was just after dawn, but stiflingly hot. Midges whined in their ears, damselflies zoomed past. The eep eep of frogs reminded Hylas painfully of Issi. Frogs were her favourite animal.

  Unseen creatures slithered away from his feet, and everywhere, birds flew up with piercing cries. Herons, swallows, ducks. Some were familiar, yet weirdly coloured, as if in a dream. He saw doves with mean red eyes, and kingfishers that weren’t blue, but stripy black and white. He glimpsed a moorhen that was bright purple, with scarlet beak and legs.

  And always the shifting, groaning reeds. They were taller than any he’d ever seen, with no leaves, only rigid green stems thicker than his wrist, and nodding heads like huge feathery green fans. They creaked and whispered of the intruders in their midst.

  ‘I’ve never seen reeds this thick,’ he said, forcing his way through a clump.

  ‘They’re not reeds,’ said Pirra. ‘They’re papyrus. It’s sacred. Egyptians make a kind of cloth from the stems. Scribes paint it with spells.’

  ‘Well whatever they’re called, they don’t like us.’

  They heard him. Out of nowhere a wind blew up and the papyrus swayed violently, tightening around him with crushing force. ‘Help me with this,’ he gasped.

  It took both of them to wrench him free.

  ‘Maybe they don’t want us to go that way,’ panted Pirra. Her hand went to the wedjat amulet at her breast.

  ‘But the other way’s too far in.’

  She nodded. ‘We need to go back. Kem said to keep to the edge.’

  Hylas noticed that although she was convinced that Kem had abandoned them, she still wanted to follow his advice. Hylas decided not to point this out.

  ‘I can’t believe he just left us,’ he said.

  ‘I knew he would,’ Pirra said in disgust.

  Hylas didn’t want it to be true. He admired Kem’s skill at surviving, and he liked him. ‘Maybe he got spooked by the border guards, then couldn’t find us. Maybe he’s looking for us right now.’

  Pirra snorted. Then she stopped. ‘This isn’t right either.’

  He nodded. ‘We need to backtrack.’

  But now they couldn’t find the tunnel they’d just left, the papyrus had closed in behind them. Things move around, Kem had warned. Papyrus, waterways …

  As soon as they went forwards again, the papyrus made it easy, parting before them, leading them deeper into the Great Green.

  In the distance, they heard Havoc’s loud, yowmping call: Where are you? To Hylas’ relief, she sounded curious, rather than worried. He imitated her call: yowm, yowm: I’m here!

  Pirra was scanning what she could see of the sky, for Echo. She shook her head. ‘I get the feeling she’s far away, enjoying all the birds.’ She sounded strained, as if she was trying to give herself courage.

  ‘What’s that?’ hissed Hylas.

  From further in came a deep, bellowing mvu mvu.

  They stared at each other. Hylas remembered Kem’s tales of river horses and giant lizards. He prayed that Havoc would have the sense to leave whatever was making that noise well alone.

  They came to a narrow stream, like a slow brown snake. Floating on the surface lay enormous round waterlily leaves, with spiky buds jutting through. The buds weren’t white, but a fragrant purplish-blue. ‘Lotus,’ murmured Pirra. ‘They’re sacred, too.’

  Their heady sweetness was making Hylas dizzy. His temples ached. He prayed that he wasn’t about to have a vision.

  ‘D’you think the water’s safe to drink?’ he heard Pirra say.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got any choice,’ he mumbled.

  The water was so murky he couldn’t see deeper than a hand’s breadth, and it tasted swampy. To his relief, the pain in his head vanished. ‘D’ you think this is the River?’ he said.

  Pirra shook her head. ‘Userref said it’s more than two arrowshots wide.’

  He filled the waterskin, and felt the current against his fingers. From what he could see of the Sun, the stream was flowing north. He pointed south. ‘We need to go that way.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘I don’t, but sometimes when rivers get near the Sea, they split into lots of little channels. I think that’s what this is. If we follow it upstream, we might find the River itself.’

  They hadn’t gone far when once again they heard Havoc: Where are you?

 
Hylas opened his mouth to reply – then shut it. ‘Can you smell smoke?’ he whispered.

  Pirra nodded. ‘Did you hear that? It sounds like – a donkey!’

  Ahead of them, the papyrus thinned, and became a belt of the kind of reeds Hylas was used to. Peering through, he saw another, wider stream, with muddy red banks and a sandbank in the middle, strewn with logs. Not far from where they hid, a flock of glossy black ibis with long curving beaks was waking up in an acacia tree. Beyond that stood the strangest trees he’d ever seen. Their trunks were criss-crossed like pine cones, and their spiky branches sprang outwards from a single point, like the Sun’s rays, with knife-like leaves all pointing down.

  ‘Date-palms,’ said Pirra. ‘We had one in a pot in the House of the Goddess.’

  Hylas didn’t reply. On the far side of the stream, smoke was rising from a cluster of mudbrick huts. Again the donkey brayed. A dog barked, geese honked, goats bleated. The familiar sounds of a village waking up.

  Three women in white linen shifts appeared and made their way down the bank, bearing waterpots on their heads. Upstream, two fishermen were heading out in a punt that seemed to be made of bundles of papyrus lashed together. One squatted in front, holding a net. The other was pushing off with a pole.

  It was all so astonishingly normal: the women’s earthenware pots, the men’s flint knives and wovengrass nets; even the crows and a vulture wheeling over the dungheap …

  And yet.

  Pirra clutched his arm. ‘Look at that,’ she breathed. The inlet where the women were filling their pots was barred by a line of crossed poles. Was that to keep them in? Or something out?

  Then Hylas saw that one of the women was missing her left foot. She hobbled about quite easily on her stump. The fisherman casting his net had only three fingers on one hand. The man holding the pole had a big puckered scar on his calf. Like a bite-mark.

  Perhaps sensing that he was being watched, the fisherman turned and scanned the bank.

  Hylas and Pirra drew back. They’d seen enough.

  For once, the papyrus decided to help, and showed them another tunnel, this one much wider, leading roughly south.

  ‘What kind of creature could have bitten them like that?’ whispered Pirra.

  Hylas looked at her. He didn’t need to say it. They were both thinking of river horses and giant lizards.

  As they headed on down the shadowy green tunnel, every creak and rustle became fraught with menace.

  Suddenly, Pirra wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘Ugh, what’s that smell?’

  Hylas halted and looked about him. The close-packed papyrus stems that made the tunnel walls were spattered with sticky black dung. He’d never seen or smelt anything like it.

  ‘Hylas?’ said Pirra.

  The tunnel in the papyrus was so wide they could walk abreast, and it sloped down to where, twenty paces away, he caught a glimmer of water. The ground beneath his feet was crushed papyrus, trodden flat. With a sickening jolt, it came to him: some creature had trampled its way through these stiff green stems, and made this tunnel. Something huge.

  Early morning is the dangery time, Kem had told him. All night they feed on the banks, and when the Sun start getting hot-hot, they move down to the water to cool off. Never get between a river horse and the water, it bite you in half …

  ‘We need to get out of this tunnel now,’ said Hylas.

  ‘The papyrus is too thick,’ Pirra said tautly, ‘I can’t get through.’

  Higher up the tunnel, the tops of the papyrus were swaying violently, although there was no wind. The ground was shaking. The next instant, Hylas saw a great grey boulder filling the tunnel – but it wasn’t a boulder, it was a massive snout the colour of wet stone.

  He leapt one way, Pirra the other. No time to go after her, it was all he could do to force his way through the close-packed stems and out of the tunnel.

  Moments later, the river horses came crashing down it, a grunting, jostling herd of monsters with snouts as vast as their swollen bellies. They were so close he could have touched them if he’d dared, and they moved at terrifying speed on their stumpy legs. One tried to push past another with an angry bellow, blasting Hylas with swampy breath and revealing an enormous red maw bristling with long yellow tusks.

  As suddenly as they’d come, they were gone. He heard a great commotion of splashing as they lumbered into the water – then silence.

  He breathed out a long breath. ‘That was close.’

  Pirra didn’t answer.

  ‘Pirra? Pirra?’

  Hylas forced his way back through the papyrus stems and into the tunnel. It was empty. Pirra wasn’t there.

  Which means she got out in time, Hylas told himself. I went one way, she went the other. Yes, that must be it.

  Crossing to the other side of the tunnel, he pushed through the papyrus stems. ‘Pirra?’ he whispered – unwilling to shout, in case the villagers heard. Or the river horses.

  No answer. But the papyrus was so thick that she couldn’t have gone far.

  As he shouldered his way through, nightmare images flashed through his mind. Pirra seized in the giant red maw of a river horse, dragged underwater, bitten in half …

  Without realizing it, he’d passed from the papyrus into another stand of reeds. Stems whipped his face. Dead leaves rustled underfoot. He hadn’t been among them long when he emerged, blinking, onto a muddy red bank before a dazzle of open water.

  He was back at the stream. But that didn’t make sense, he’d been going the other way. And yet there was the sandbank and the acacia tree and the date-palms …

  Although – was it the same stream? He could see no sign of the village or the fishermen, and no logs on that sandbank, although several were lying near it, half-submerged, and a few floated not far from where he stood. The date-palms were different, too. Some of them were leaning right over the stream, and beneath them in the shallows, waterlilies rocked gently.

  ‘Pirra, where are you?’ he cried.

  These waterlily buds had burst open into large triangular flowers with purple-blue petals as sharp as spears. They jutted upwards, like hands reaching for the Sun, and their scent was overpowering.

  In consternation, Hylas cast up and down the bank. If only Pirra would emerge from the reeds, dishevelled and furious with him. Or if Echo would swoop down and help him find her – or Havoc pounce on him in one of her mock ambushes.

  But the reeds and the papyrus murmured their secrets to each other. They knew where Pirra was, but they wouldn’t tell.

  A flock of ducks flew down and landed in the middle of the stream. Distractedly, Hylas watched their wake rippling outwards, stirring a big sunken log floating near the lilies.

  Suddenly, lights flashed behind his eyes, and the burning finger stabbed his temples. No no please, not now …

  Then it was too late, and his senses turned preternaturally sharp as the veil hiding the spirit world blew away. He saw the purple scent of waterlilies hazing the air. He heard the tiny suck of frog feet moving among the reeds – and the slow, strong thump of some water monster’s swampy heart.

  Why couldn’t he hear Pirra’s?

  Again he glanced up and down the banks, but all he saw were reeds and papyrus – a searing green against the throbbing red banks – and his own shadow, stretching blackly behind him, with its hands on its hips.

  What? His own arms were hanging by his sides.

  He stared over his shoulder. What lay behind him was definitely his shadow. It extended from his feet, as shadows do – but it wasn’t doing what he was doing. As he stood frozen in disbelief, his shadow raised one hand and shaded its eyes; then, with its other hand, it pointed at something in the shallows.

  Out of the tail of his eye, Hylas saw another duck gliding in to land. With his heightened senses, its blue and yellow plumage glowed unbearably bright, and its landing splash was a waterfall roar.

  His shadow was watching it too. Both its hands were back on its hips, and its head was co
cked, as if it was waiting for something to happen.

  Arching its neck, the duck gave itself a vigorous shake and folded its wings. Behind it, the waterlilies exploded. The duck didn’t even have time to squawk. Giant jaws engulfed it with a crunching snap and dragged it down.

  The giant lizard swallowed the duck in two chomping gulps, then turned with a snakelike twist and swam towards Hylas.

  Crocodile, he thought numbly. This is a crocodile.

  It was a monster not of flesh, but of stone. Its massive armoured body bristled with spikes. Its teeth jutted the length of its scaly jaws, which it held agape in a meaningless grin – and its empty yellow stare was fixed on him.

  Slowly, he backed away.

  The crocodile floated in the shallows, watching him.

  His mind darted in panic. Lizards move fast, he would never outrun it, and his knife would never pierce that flinty hide.

  With another horrible snakelike twist, the monster came scything through the waterlilies towards him. At the same moment, he heard rustling behind him, and a second crocodile burst from the reeds, moving at incredible speed on its bent lizard legs.

  There was only one thing to do. Hylas raced for the nearest date-palm.

  Its trunk grew at a slant over the water, he managed to scramble a short way up. Not far enough. Both crocodiles were closing fast. The trunk had no branches to grab on to, they were all clustered at the crown, high overhead. He’d have to try something he’d only done once before, years ago, when a boar had chased him up a pine tree.

  Clasping the trunk between his legs and clinging on with one arm, he yanked the coil of rope over his head, then wound one end round his right wrist, passed the rope behind the trunk, and twisted it frantically around his left wrist, so that he was gripping the trunk in a tight rope sling. The tree’s bark had that weird pine-cone roughness, made of lots of scratchy little ledges, and the rawhide snagged, as he’d prayed it would. He jerked it higher. Then, gripping with both feet, he half-hopped, half-hoisted himself up.