That hideous face whose octopus eyes bulged as their owner tapped faster and faster upon the high priest’s bobbing head, until suddenly Khasathut uttered a shrill scream and jerked spastically in his jeweled chair. Now his legs gripped Anulep’s waist and his good hand clutched at the high priest’s head, which had become almost a blur of motion. For a moment longer it lasted, then—
With a second shriek the Pharaoh drew back his legs, placed his feet on Anulep’s shoulders and thrust the man away from him. As the Vizier sprawled on the stone floor, his hands still clasped in position behind his back, Khai saw the distended knob of Pharaoh’s penis throbbing and discharging a few last drops of yellow slime. Then once again the boy was violently ill; but it was more the sight he saw with his mind’s eye than the depravity of the actual scene which sickened him. He had simply remembered the way Anulep had smiled at him—the Vizier’s toothless, circular smile—and the fact that tomorrow he himself was to visit the dentist!
IV
PLOT FOR FREEDOM
Of the rest, of whatever else passed in that hidden chamber of horrors deep in the heart of the great pyramid, Khai saw nothing at all. For when the blacks carried Khasathut’s sexually expended, naked figure out of the hexagonal room in his jeweled throne, and long before they returned with Anulep to commence the cleaning-up of the place, he had already flown. Possibly that was as well, for as yet he knew nothing of the pyramid’s deepest horrors and had not even questioned the reason why Pharaoh’s blacks had filed teeth. . . .
But a flame had sparked in Khai’s breast, the red flame of revenge, and his one desire now was to live to grow into a man—a great warrior—and then, somehow, one day, to drag Pharaoh down and destroy him. Just exactly how he might achieve this he did not know, but certainly he could do nothing here. Since there was nowhere in Asorbes for him to hide, perhaps no hiding place in all of Khem, then obviously he must flee Khem. First, however, he must escape from the pyramid.
Already a plan had formed in Khai’s mind, a wild and daring plan but by no means impossible. It would be sheerest folly to try to escape through the lower labyrinths and out into the city via the pyramid’s ground-floor entrances; any one of Pharaoh’s hundreds of guardsmen might see him and take him to Anulep. Doubtless, orders had already been given to that effect: that if he tried to escape he must be brought back. Well then, by what other route might he make his escape?
For anyone else the task might have seemed impossible, but to Khai, whose father had built the vast monument and shown him many of its secrets, it was not even improbable; though certainly it would be very dangerous. As he hurried back to his tiny cell of a room through the inky blackness of the cramped corridors that formed the pyramid’s interlocking mazes, he worried at the problem until the solution was crystal clear.
By the time he regained his room and struck flint to his tiny lamp, he knew exactly what he must do. The tools of his escape were to hand—a pair of woven rush mats on the floor, and the pallet he had been given for a bed—so that without more ado he formed these into a tight cylindrical bundle which he strapped lengthwise to his back.
Five years ago, Harsin Ben Ibizin had shown his son the Pharaoh’s water supply and how it worked: the system of huge exterior surfaces of stone high in the pyramid’s faces which sluiced droplets of condensation into narrowing watercourses that flowed in turn into brick pipes within the pyramid, where they descended steeply to the cisterns of the lower levels. Each single drop of moisture which formed on mighty sloping surfaces eventually found its way to the pyramid’s kitchens, its bathrooms and ablutions. And Khai had been allowed to climb up to one of these watercourses until he had peeped out from a height of over four hundred feet to gaze in awe across the rooftops of Asorbes.
At that time, Khai had thought to ask his father if it would be possible to slide down the steeply sloping outside wall from such an inlet. Oh, most surely it would, Harsin Ben Ibizin had replied—if one had the hide of a hippo! Otherwise the stone, however fine-grained and smooth it might appear, would strip away flesh from bones like a huge file. Indeed, of those many workers who had fallen from the monument during the long years of its construction, many had slid down the sloping faces to the bottom, but none of them had survived.
Khai remembered his father’s words to this very day. Well, he did not have the hide of a hippo, but he did have these rush mats and a linen pallet full of shredded straw. Also, if he could divert a little water from the mouth of the inlet and down the sloping face, perhaps that would lubricate his way to excellent effect. For a moment, as he retraced his steps by the light of his tiny lamp to a place where a narrow chimneylike flue appeared in the ceiling over his head, Khai was so afraid that he almost abandoned his plan there and then. But only for a moment. Death was far more to his liking than the life he would be forced to lead if he remained here.
And so he climbed into the flue and wound his way upward, pushing his lamp before him and placing it in whichever niches he could find while he used his hands and feet for climbing. It was not a hard climb but seemed interminable, just as it had five years ago. Hand and footholds were plentiful, a stairway almost, designed to give maximum assistance to any workman called upon to inspect the watercourse up above; and there were places where Khai could actually pause and rest, sitting on tiny ledges while his feet dangled into the black throat of the flue.
So he progressed, and within an hour of leaving his room he crept over the lip of the chimney and felt a cool breeze blowing from ahead. Rounding an awkward bend, he saw the stars of night set in a jet sky, and a moment later, his light sputtered and was blown out. Crawling on all fours with his head occasionally scraping against the low ceiling, Khai felt the rim of the brick pipe that descended into the bowels of the pyramid. Beyond the pipe, he followed the channel of the gutter that fed it with water and was pleased when his hands felt a trickling of cool liquid. So efficient was the system that water began to collect and flow soon after the sun went down, the flow increasing all through the night until, with the dawn, the gutters and pipes would be veritable rivers and waterfalls in miniature. Khai knew he must be gone long before then, however, and so hurried forward, eager now to put his plan into operation.
At last, he reached the end of the inspection tunnel where it narrowed to a circular opening high in the pyramid’s sloping face. From here he looked out, as he had done five years ago, on the sleeping city of Asorbes. He had emerged on the south face and to his left could see the night-shining Nile wandering down from its vastly distant sources. The moon was thin-horned and gave little light, which was just as well. The air he breathed was full of familiar odors, of fires and cooking and spices, and other smells which seemed wafted to him from lands beyond. Lands of mystery and adventure.
Although there were nine such water-inlets—three to each face except the incomplete east face which overlooked the Nile and faced the rising sun-god, Re, reborn each day—the boy had deliberately chosen this one, set central in the south face. He had done so for a number of reasons. He knew there was a massive pile of soft sand at the base of the monument at this spot, soon to be used for filling in a disused subterranean vault; he knew also that the southern quarter of the city housed the vast majority of slaves of foreign origin—Nubians and Siwadis, a few Theraens, Syrans and Kushites—and that Pharaoh’s guards and patrolmen rarely entered such areas at dead of night; and furthermore, beyond the slave quarters and close to the city’s south wall, there dwelled his father’s old friend Arkhenos. Arkhenos of Subon, a fortress city on the Khem-Therae-Nubia border. If anyone could help him flee the city, he was sure that Arkhenos would be the one. . . .
V
ESCAPE FROM THE
PYRAMID
Cupping his hands at the limestone lip where the dripping water gathered, Khai spent almost an hour diverting the steadily increasing rivulet down the pyramid’s exterior face. When he could see the thin moonlight reflected in a silvery path that reached almost to the ground far below, th
en he knew he was ready. Quickly, he soaked his pallet and rush mats in what little water had escaped his hands to fill the gutter, then tied the bundle at its corners so that the mats lay beneath the pallet.
Now he pushed the entire contraption out through the water inlet, holding on to it and edging forward until he sat on the lip of the inlet with his legs outside. Then he pulled the reinforced pallet up under himself until he could hook his sandaled feet into the forward corners while his hands grasped the knots slightly to his rear. In this position, with his head and shoulders slightly raised, he once more bumped and edged his body forward until, in one hair-raising moment, he felt his backside bump over the lip of the inlet onto the sloping surface of the outside face.
At first, it seemed that he was stuck there, immobile, but then, with a jerk and a slither, he felt the stone begin to slip by beneath him and almost immediately he started to gather speed. In the space of a few heartbeats, it was as if a wind blew upon him, though he knew the air was almost completely still. Then, too, his sled began to rotate, so that in a moment, he was riding side-on and could feel the pallet beginning to buck beneath him, threatening to spill him. A moment more and he was speeding backwards down the steep wall, then rotating the other way until he was back in his original position.
Feeling the pallet bucking again, he lay his head and shoulders back to flatten his profile and watched the stars overhead turning as he continued to rotate. And all the time he accelerated and the wind blew more wildly upon him, showering his face with rush fragments from the disintegrating mats as he thundered down the side of the pyramid, until he smelled smouldering linen and knew that his pallet must soon burst into flames!
Rotating faster and faster, while the stars above seemed to form a vast heavenly wheel, Khai felt a hideous sickness welling inside and closed his eyes. In another moment, the pallet bucked wildly and Khai guessed that he had reached the lower part of the pyramid, where his diverted stream of water had petered out. Again the battered, disintegrating sled bucked and rose up beneath him, this time leaping free of the stone face and tumbling over and over in mid-air.
Now he clung desperately to his smoldering pallet, his eyes tightly shut, expecting at every moment to feel the bite of the pyramid’s stone face. Instead, he was dashed down in soft sand made hard by his rate of descent.
Mercifully, he had landed on the outward sloping side of the sandpile with the remains of his pallet still beneath him, breaking his fall. Wildly, he rolled and bounced, still falling and now completely out of control, but by the time he reached bottom, his speed was greatly reduced. At last, with a jolt that knocked the last remaining ounce of air out of him, he came to a halt on firm ground.
His first thought was to be up on his feet and feeling to see if anything was broken; but even the act of sitting up made him feel dizzy and sick, so that for the moment he lay still. Eventually, when the roaring had gone out of his head and the stars had steadied in the sky, he propped himself up on one elbow, gazing about at night’s black shadows and wondering if his escape had been witnessed. It was unlikely, he knew, for the south face overlooked only the slave quarters, but nonetheless he could not stay here.
He forced himself to his feet and staggered for a moment while once more the night sky seemed to revolve. Then, crouching low and heading south, he ran as fast as he could over rough and pitted earth. In a matter of minutes he had left the shadow of the pyramid behind and the jagged silhouettes of the tumble-down slave quarters loomed ahead. At last Khai began to breathe more freely and he had to repress a mad urge to shout for joy. He was free of the pyramid, free—at least for the moment—of the Pharaoh, and in his freedom his heart soared like that of a small bird.
His mind was so full of plans that its thinking was no longer completely lucid, so that soon only the wild joy of freedom remained, and a natural directional instinct which took him straight through the heart of the rambling slave quarters. Part of his mental fatigue sprang from the fact that his stomach was empty, had been empty for much too long, and the rest of it was rooted in the mind-wrenching horror of his recent experiences, which surely would have stunned far more mature minds than Khai’s.
Now the low, dark brick buildings had closed in on him and he trotted silently through winding alleys awash with filth and crawling with vermin. In all Asorbes, this was the one region where sanitation had been allowed to fall so drastically into disrepair, so that the sewers situated immediately beneath the streets functioned poorly and the water supply was just as unsafe as was its continuity uncertain. An eerie, unnatural silence shrouded the place, whose stillness was such that the patter of Khai’s feet sounded clearly audible in his fear-sensitized ears.
He must by now be in the center of this region from which, through countless generations, the Pharaohs had drawn their polyglot work-force of menials and laborers. Just how much blood, he wondered, had these people given to raise Khasathut’s monument to the sky? And with his thoughts returned morbidly to the pyramid once more, Khai paused in his running to cast an anxious glance back at that monstrous moonlit tomb whose silhouette loomed over the rooftops. One day, he promised himself, he would see that now-hated symbol of perverted power reduced to tumbled ruins. But for now—
He turned his face to the south once more—and ran straight into the arms of a huge black man!
VI
KING OF SLAVES
“Oh? And what’s this?” the great black rumbled, holding Khai’s head and turning it until the moonlight shone on his pale face. “A boy, running in the night streets with the rats? Aye, and a boy with meat on his bones at that. No slave’s son this one, I’ll warrant, but the well-fed pup of some bitch of Khem! Who are you, boy?”
At first Khai had thought himself caught by one of Pharaoh’s black guardsmen, but now he could see that his captor wore only the threadbare rags of a slave and that he bore the ankh brand on his forehead. “Let me go,” he gasped, wriggling and squirming, trying desperately to free himself from the man’s grasp. “Let me go!”
“And where would you be going, young master? Hasn’t your father warned you against entering the slave quarter at night?” The black man’s voice was full of a wry cynicism, as if he already knew the answers to his questions and much more.
“I’m on my way to the house of Arkhenos of Subon,” Khai answered, trying his best to sound affronted and failing miserably. “I decided to take a short-cut.”
“A short-cut, indeed!” Again the black peered into Khai’s face, a grim smile playing at the corners of his thick-lipped mouth. “And why, I wonder, did I see you pausing to shiver and tremble and look back over your shoulder—as if you feared that perhaps you were followed? Hardly the act of a boy brave enough to enter the slave quarter late at night, eh? And how is it you come from the direction of the pyramid?—but then, why shouldn’t you. After all, it was your father built the thing!”
Khai shrank back in shock and astonishment, unable to believe his own ears. Had Anulep already discovered his absence, then, alerting all of Asorbes to keep watch for him? Were people already searching for him in the city? It did not seem possible. And yet, how else could this black slave know of him?
The Nubian chuckled as if reading his mind. “It’s in your eyes, lad,” he said, “written all over your face. Damn me, but you’re a poor liar! Oh, I know you all right, Khai Ibizin, and I know of you. Didn’t I spend a whole week building a wall around your father’s garden? Ah, I see you remember me now.”
Khai’s mouth had fallen open. He did indeed remember the man. He and one other slave had been given the task of constructing a many-arched wall around the perimeter of the garden, so as to partially seclude it from the view of tradesmen coming into the courtyard. They had been tasked by virtue of their skill at stoneworking. It was a job which could have been completed in two or three days, but Harsin Ben Ibizin had gone very easy on the slaves and had made sure that they got their rest and were well-fed.
“Yes,” the black continued, ?
??you surely know me now. Well, I’ve been waiting for you since first I noticed you preparing your escape route.”
“What?” Khai gasped again. “But how could you possibly have seen—” he began.
“Look!” the other commanded, cutting him off, forcibly turning his head in huge hands until the boy’s eyes stared back the way he had come. At first, he saw only the littered street, the crumbling walls, huddled buildings and black shadows. Then his eyes went above and beyond these to the looming man-made mountain that was Khasathut’s pyramid.
“The south face,” said the black man by way of explanation. “It’s in shadow now, but when the moon was on it—why!—at first I thought that the pyramid wept! It was the water that gave you away, Khai, the water you used to make your slide smooth and cool. It crept down the south face like a little silver river, like the tears of the moon!”
“But if you saw it,” Khai gasped, “then perhaps—”
“Others?” The Nubian shook his head. “A few slaves, perhaps, but they would most likely come to me before doing anything or telling anyone else. As Pharaoh is the king of Khem, I, Adonda Gomba, am king of the slaves. You were wise, Khai, in choosing the south face, for it overlooks the slave quarter and little else.”
The boy nodded. “I know. But you said you knew who I was before you saw me. How could you have known?”
“You’re not the first one to run from the pyramid, boy. But you’re one of the first to make it. Oh, you’re not out of the fire yet, not by a long shot. But at least you’ve made a good start. As to how I knew it was you: you were the pyramid’s most recent prisoner, and one of the youngest. Only a boy would have dared such a wild escape, and it would have to be a boy who knew the pyramid’s innards better than his own.” He shrugged. “Who else could it have been?”