The Crocodile Tomb

by Michelle Paver

  The Egyptian girl had seemed keen to atone for her past ruthlessness, and was so grateful to Hylas and Pirra for ridding her land of the Crows that she’d granted them safe-conduct to the coast, and had found a boat willing to take them. She’d also brought Pirra a gift, a beautiful little ivory comb with a horse carved on the back. Pirra accepted it with chilly reserve. She could not forget that Meritamen had been prepared to doom Userref’s spirit in order to save her family.

  Meritamen had a gift for Hylas, too: a new bronze knife in a splendid sheath of braided calfhide.

  ‘You should give it to him yourself,’ said Pirra. ‘He’s out in the desert with his lion, he’ll be back soon.’

  But the Egyptian girl flushed and shook her head. ‘No, no,’ she said hastily. ‘Better if I don’t see him again.’ Her eyes filled. ‘He would have died for you, Pirra,’ she said wistfully. ‘You are so lucky to have such a man.’

  But he’s not my man, thought Pirra. And I don’t know if he ever will be.

  Above her, Echo perched with beak agape and wings half-spread, keeping cool. She glanced at Pirra, but didn’t fly down. Pirra guessed that the falcon was still wary of the new cuff.

  Hylas came and sat beside her with his elbows on his knees. He’d tied his hair with a twist of grass, and he looked much more his old self. Pirra wanted him to put his arm around her, but he didn’t. She was too proud to put her arm around him because she knew something was holding him back. She used to think it was her scar, but she didn’t any more. It was something else. She wished she knew what.

  She asked if he’d found Havoc, and he said yes, and told her about meeting Kem. But she could see from his face that he’d heard bad news.

  ‘Rensi just got word from downriver,’ he said. ‘The Crows are making astonishing speed. With forty men at the oars and the current getting stronger all the time, they’ll reach the Sea in a few days.’

  ‘Well. That means they won’t be lying in wait for us when we head north.’

  ‘Oh no, they’ll be long gone,’ he said bitterly. ‘Telamon will be eager to get back to Mycenae. Telamon the triumphant, returning with the dagger of Koronos!’ He was scowling, clenching and unclenching his fists. ‘I had it in my hand, Pirra! Now they’ve got it, and it’s all to do again.’

  Pirra saw the wedjat round his neck, with its fateful dent. She thought of the moment when he’d stepped out into the open with his chest bared to Telamon’s arrow: for her. ‘Do you regret that you threw it to him?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Of course not, he’d have killed you! But we’re back where we started – again. Sometimes I think I’ll spend my whole life wandering, never returning to Lykonia, never finding Issi.’

  Pirra was silent. For her, Lykonia and Issi were merely names. To Hylas, they were the place where he’d grown up, and the sister he’d known for longer than he’d known her.

  ‘I can’t bear not knowing what happened to her,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Worrying all the time. What if I never find out?’

  There was nothing she could say to make him feel better, so she kept silent.

  They watched a stripy kingfisher perch on a rock with a fish in its beak. It bashed the fish on the rock till it stopped wriggling, then gulped it down.

  Pirra said, ‘It wasn’t for nothing, Hylas. If we hadn’t come to Egypt, Userref’s spirit would have been lost for ever, and Nebetku would be facing eternity without him.’ She swallowed. ‘While you were in the desert, I had a dream. I saw Userref and Nebetku in the Place of Reeds. They were both healthy and – so happy. What you did – swapping scrolls – it worked. Userref is there already, and soon Nebetku will be with him.’

  Fiercely, she blinked back tears. Then she spoke the spell Rensi had taught her: ‘I have thrown off my tomb wrappings and am reborn like the lotus. The doors of the sky are opened for me. As a falcon I have flown up into the light, and my spirit is free.’

  ‘Be at peace, Userref,’ she said in Akean. ‘Until the River flows upstream and the raven turns white: be at peace.’

  The next morning, they left Pa-Sobek and started north.

  The boat Meritamen had found for them turned out to be Itineb’s. With the heb over and the River rising fast, he and his brothers were heading home, and only too happy to take Hylas, Pirra and Havoc – particularly as Meritamen was paying them so well that they’d be returning to their village rich men.

  Hylas was hugely relieved. It meant they could keep Pirra’s last piece of Keftian gold to buy passage to Akea – and they didn’t have to persuade a group of unknown Egyptians to take a lioness on board. ‘We just need to keep her well fed,’ he told Pirra. ‘That way, she won’t go after any cattle.’

  ‘Or cats or dogs or children,’ she added drily.

  With the strengthening current, they made good speed. As Hylas watched the banks gliding past, it seemed that Egypt was slipping away behind him like a brilliantly coloured dream – or like tomb paintings sliding back into the darkness after the torch has passed on.

  They slid past a sandbank where crocodiles basked in the Sun. Hylas thought of Alekto. Clearly, Pirra was thinking the same thing, because she turned to him, and her eyes were shadowed. ‘I think her death was my doing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I asked Nebetku to write me a spell to bring ruin to its wearer. He wrote it in red ink, and I made a little crocodile out of wax. Then I wrapped the spell around it and put it in a pouch. When I was in the boat with Alekto, I tricked her into taking it off me.’

  ‘But – that put you in danger too. When the boat was sinking, why didn’t you tell her what it was? She’d have flung it overboard and you’d have been safe.’

  She turned back to the River. ‘Because I’d sworn to avenge Userref.’

  Hylas looked at her. In her hawklike profile he saw the strength of her mother, the High Priestess of Keftiu.

  ‘Telamon could have saved her,’ she said. ‘Instead he left her and went after you. But it was my spell that drew the crocodiles.’

  Hylas regarded her with new respect. Kem was right. There were not many girls like Pirra.

  He was jolted awake around midnight by a clamour on the bank. Havoc was gone, but Pirra was awake. Like him, she’d drawn her knife.

  Together they listened to drums, shouts and the clash of weapons. It was coming from a large village a short distance from where Itineb and his brothers had moored for the night. Figures leapt in a blaze of torchlight, waving weapons at the sky.

  ‘They’re not fighting,’ said Pirra. ‘More like – trying to ward something off.’

  ‘Look at the Moon,’ muttered Hylas. It was a strange, dull red that he’d never seen before.

  The boat tilted as Itineb jumped on board. ‘Demons attacking the Moon,’ he said in a low voice. ‘The villagers are chasing them away. Look, it’s working!’ The rim of the Moon was glowing silver.

  ‘Blood on the Moon means fighting to come,’ added Itineb. ‘I spoke to the village wisewoman. She said it won’t be in Egypt, thank the gods, but far to the north.’

  Hylas and Pirra exchanged glances. ‘Akea,’ they said.

  With his stump, Itineb straightened his wig. ‘I asked the wisewoman to read the Moon’s markings. She said: There is calamity in the Land of the North Wind. The rivers run with blood, and yet the people still drink from them – and the black-winged enemy casts a long shadow …’

  ‘The Crows,’ said Pirra.

  It seemed to Hylas that he saw a great bronze fist reaching out to seize Akea. Now that the Crows had the dagger, they were invincible. They wouldn’t be content with Mycenae and Lykonia. They would go after Arkadia, too, and Messenia, where Issi was hiding.

  They would want it all.

  Towards dawn, he sat with Pirra in the prow, watching the dark River gliding past. Havoc sat between them. Hylas scratched one furry ear, and Pirra scratched the other. Hylas wanted to touch her fingers, but he hesitated and she noticed, and put her hands in her lap.

&
nbsp; ‘I haven’t yet thanked you for what you did,’ she said after a while. ‘I mean, offering yourself to Telamon …’

  Hylas shifted and made a noise in his throat. He didn’t want to be thanked.

  Havoc rubbed her cheek against his calf, urging him to go on stroking. When he didn’t, she rested her head on his knee and gazed up at him with big Moon-silvered eyes.

  He knew he must answer the question that Pirra was too proud to ask. ‘Pirra,’ he began. ‘It’s not your scar that’s keeping us apart. It never was – or that you’re highborn and I’m not.’ He touched his temple. ‘The visions are getting worse.’

  She looked at him. ‘What do you mean, worse?’

  ‘They’re much clearer. And I – I see gods … I saw them after Telamon shot me. That’s why I just stood there, when you were yelling at me to take cover.’ He paused. ‘What if next time it happens, I put you in danger? I mean, because I’m having a vision?’

  Echo lit on to Pirra’s shoulder. Distractedly, she touched the falcon’s scaly foot. ‘Here’s what I think,’ she said at last. ‘When Telamon shot you, the gods let you live. If the wedjat’s thong had been a finger longer or a finger shorter, you’d be dead. But it wasn’t, Hylas. The gods let you live. I think that’s a good sign.’

  He blew out a long breath. Then nodded slowly. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well it’s good enough for me. No one knows what the future holds. But there’s always hope.’

  The girl had curled up and gone to sleep, but the boy remained awake. The she-lion sensed that he was still worried and unhappy, so she leant against him to cheer him up.

  She was glad to see that he was finally growing some hairs on his chin: soon he would have a proper mane that went all the way round his face. The she-lion decided that from now on, she must give him plenty of licking and muzzle-rubs, to help it grow.

  The Light was coming, and soon the Great Lion in the Up would turn fierce. The she-lion sat beside her boy, rumbling with the contentment that comes from a full belly, and feeling relieved that this floating pile of reeds no longer made her sick.

  Earlier in the Dark, she’d gone hunting in the burning lands, and killed a buck. After eating till her belly was taut, she’d left the rest for the jackals and the spotted laughing dogs, who’d been slinking about, too scared to get any closer. That was good: dogs should be scared of lions.

  The falcon was asleep, perched on the tree that grew from the floating reeds. As usual, she’d tucked one foot under her belly, and fallen asleep with one eye shut and one eye open. This was weird, but the she-lion was used to it. And she was glad that at last the falcon understood that she, too, belonged with the pride.

  With a huge yawn, the she-lion rose to her feet and gave the boy a rasping lick on the jaw. He batted her away, so she play-batted him back. When he got up again, she gave him another lick, and he started making the yelping sounds that were his way of laughing. Then the girl woke up, the falcon flew down, and the whole pride was together.

  This made the she-lion extremely happy. It was how things should be.

  The Crocodile Tomb is the fourth book in the story of Hylas and Pirra, which tells of their adventures in Akea, Keftiu and Egypt, and of their fight to vanquish the Crows. The last book in the series will be published in 2016.

  Author’s Note

  The Crocodile Tomb takes place three and a half thousand years ago, in what we call ancient Egypt. Hylas and Pirra aren’t Egyptian, of course, they’re from Ancient Greece. So I’ll say a bit about them first, and then go on to Egypt.

  Hylas and Pirra’s World

  We don’t know much about Bronze Age Greece, as its people left so few written records, but we do know something about their astonishing cultures, which we call the Mycenaeans and the Minoans. (Hylas is Mycenaean, and Pirra is Minoan.)

  It’s thought that this was a world of scattered chieftaincies, separated by mountain ranges and forests, and that it was wetter and greener than today, with far more wild animals in both land and sea. Also, this was long before the Ancient Greeks ranged their gods into an orderly pantheon of Zeus, Hera, Hades, and so on. That’s why the gods Hylas and Pirra worship have different names; they were the forerunners of the later lot.

  To create the world of Hylas and Pirra, I’ve studied the archaeology of the Greek Bronze Age. To get an idea of peoples’ beliefs, I’ve drawn on those of more recent peoples who still live in traditional ways, as I did in my Stone Age series, Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. And although most people in Hylas’ time lived by farming or fishing, I think much of the knowledge and beliefs of the Stone Age hunter-gatherers would have survived into the Bronze Age, particularly among poorer people, such as Hylas himself.

  Concerning place names, Akea (or Achaea, as it’s often spelt) is the ancient name for mainland Greece, and Lykonia is my name for present-day Lakonia. I haven’t changed the name Mycenae, as it’s so well-known. And I’ve used the name ‘Keftian’ for the great Cretan civilization we call Minoan. (We don’t know what they called themselves; depending on which book you read, their name may have been Keftians, or that may have been a name given to them by the ancient Egyptians.)

  The map of the World of Gods and Warriors shows the world as Hylas and Pirra experience it, so it leaves out many places and islands that don’t come into the story, and includes others that I made up, such as the Island of the Fin People and Thalakrea.

  Ancient Egypt

  If you’re keen on Ancient Egypt, you might like to know that the story takes place at the start of what we call the New Kingdom, that is, the Eighteenth Dynasty, just after the Second Intermediate Period, when the Egyptians had rid themselves of the people called the Hyksos, who’d taken over the Nile delta. In the story, these are the foreigners from the east whom the Perao (Pharaoh) has ousted with the help of Koronos’ bronze. (We don’t know much about the Hyksos, which is why I’m being vague.)

  Concerning Ancient Egyptian words and writing, unlike Hylas and Pirra’s people, the Ancient Egyptians left lots of written records. I’ve tried to use real Ancient Egyptian names as much as I can, but there’s a big BUT, which is actually pretty fascinating. Ancient Egyptian writing, which we call hieroglyphs (or the hieroglyphic script), didn’t include vowels. They simply left them out. No ‘a, e, i, o, u’. So in a sense, they wrote in a kind of ancient text-speak.

  This means that archaeologists have to guess which vowels go where, or reconstruct words from later sources. For example, the Ancient Egyptian word for ‘sun’ was written ‘r’, and archaeologists think it was pronounced ‘re’ (although in some books, you’ll see it as ‘ra’). And in the story, when Itineb tells Hylas about ‘Shemu’, he’s using the Ancient Egyptian word for ‘summer’, which was written ‘smw’.

  You may be wondering why the Egyptian gods in the story have different names from those you might have read elsewhere. This is because I’ve used their Ancient Egyptian names, rather than those we commonly use today, which are derived from Greek versions. Thus:

  Ausar: Osiris (green-faced god)

  Anpu: Anubis (jackal-headed god)

  Sekhmet: Sekhmet (lioness-headed goddess)

  Heru: Horus (falcon-headed god)

  Het-Heru: Hathor (cow-headed goddess)

  Sobek: Sobek (crocodile-headed god)

  Tjehuti: Thoth (ibis- or baboon-headed god)

  A quick word on Ta-Mehi, the Great Green. Archaeologists used to think this was Ancient Egyptians’ word for the sea, but many now believe it refers to the Nile delta, and that’s how I’ve used it in the story. Also, I’ve kept the name ‘Egypt’, even though it’s derived from Greek, because it felt too artificial to change it.

  For the map of Egypt, I’ve included only those places which are important to the story, because otherwise it would have been too cluttered. And Pa-Sobek in the story is only loosely based on present-day Kom Ombo, and I’ve moved it a bit further south.

  I should also say something about mummification. Animals were mummified in
enormous numbers in Egypt, but this was at a later period than the time in which the story is set. (It’s in this later period that some of the most famous animal mummies were made, such as those in the animal catacombs at Saqqara.) However, animals had been mummified to a lesser extent for thousands of years before then, so I felt justified in inventing the Crocodile Tomb and its animal mummies.

  To create the Egypt that Hylas and Pirra experience, I’ve drawn on my many visits to Egypt over the years. I’ve often been into the desert, and have seen many temple ruins, and climbed (or crawled) down lots of tombs, both royal and humble. Anyone who’s done that will know how sweltering and claustrophobic it can get.

  I also spent a day at the British Museum, learning how to write hieroglyphs in the authentic Ancient Egyptian way, using a rush pen and soot-based ink, on real papyrus (I needed a specially cut rush, as I’m left-handed!). My teacher was a calligrapher who’s studied hieroglyphs. Watching this modern-day scribe at work, and hearing him talk, was fascinating. It’s from him that I learnt about how to draw the bird symbols; and it’s true that adding the beak is when you really feel you’ve created a bird.

  The Nile has changed a lot from Hylas and Pirra’s time. The papyrus has gone, and so have the crocodiles and hippos. And the river no longer floods, as it was dammed in the 20th century. But in places, there are still extensive reedbeds, which remain a paradise for birds, insects and reptiles. I’ve spent hours wandering through them at different times of the year. I’ve seen pied kingfishers, bee-eaters, glossy black ibis, egrets, all sorts of ducks, herons and other birds. My favourites are Hylas’ ‘purple moorhens’, which are actually a kind of gallinule, like large purple chickens, with bright crimson legs and beaks.