“Will you not come with me, Mhyna? Flee Khem now and be mine in Nubia?”
She stroked his hair and looked down at his upturned face. The look in her eyes was one of surprise. “Do you love me, Khai?”
He made no answer.
She shook her head. “And what of my husband, and his child which I carry? Should I forsake the one and ask you to be father to the other? I think not.”
“Husband?” he slowly stood up. “Child?” his eyes went to her belly.
“Oh, he’s not showing yet, Khai—but he’s there all the same.” She patted her slightly rounded belly.
“Husband,” he said again, shaking his head.
“He’s an old man of—oh, thirty,” she explained, “and he’s good to me. Better than I am to him. He’s my father’s partner. . . .”
Khai said nothing but simply stared at her, his mouth half open.
She framed his face with cool hands. “Khai, I didn’t intend you to love me, only my body. I only wanted to seduce you—not to break your heart.”
He pulled sharply away from her. “My heart’s not so easily broken, Mhyna.” But there was a catch in his voice. He stooped and snatched up his bow and quiver of arrows, took two short paces along one of the boat’s wooden ribs and leaped over the outer bulwark of reeds into water that was waist deep.
“Khai—” she began, then checked herself.
He waded ashore and climbed up onto a bank shaded with leafy branches. Only then did he pause to look back. Mhyna looked at him where he stood on the bank. “Will you remember me, Khai?”
His eyes were hot and angry, but he nevertheless nodded his answer.
Mhyna turned her sail into the wind and the barge began slowly to slide off the silt into deeper water. Khai wanted to wave, to call out to her, to wish her well. Instead he concentrated on the lump in his throat, which refused to be swallowed.
Then she was gone around the river’s bend, and only the ripples on the river remained to say that she had ever been there at all.
part
SIX
I
THE SLAVERS
By mid-afternoon, Khai was unable to remember exactly what Mhyna had looked like. His nostrils could detect her perfume, the scent of her body, the pungency of the oil she had rubbed into her skin; but try as he might, he could not focus his mind’s eye upon her face. Sensibly, he took this as a sign that he had not been and was not in love with her, and he put her to the back of his mind.
He must concentrate now on making good progress through the forest, and indeed he had made progress. He must have covered a good nine or ten miles since leaving Mhyna’s barge. The forest was mainly still, shady, dappled with patches of sunlight and furtive with hidden animal eyes. Tiny creatures moved in the leaves and grasses; the occasional bird would rise up in a clatter of wings at his approach; more than one group of wild pigs had rushed off through the undergrowth as he came trotting through the trees.
Twice when he had paused to get his wind and check his direction of travel (he used the sun, which he kept at his back and on his right), he had noted an odd effect. It must surely be his eyes which were playing tricks with him in the gold-dappled gloom, but it sometimes seemed to him that he stood on a vast carpet of yellow sand, with huge dunes stretching away on every hand and lizards that moved underfoot instead of small rodents and leaf-mold beetles. Indeed, if he half-closed his eyes he could conjure the vision out of thin air, could draw the sand down from the sky and drown the entire forest in its mighty drifts. It frightened him a little, and he wondered if it could possibly be the harbinger of some fever contracted in Asorbes’ slave quarter. Best to put it out of his mind, along with Mhyna and her forgotten face, and stop worrying about it. Still . . . he wondered if the forest’s floor had ever actually been a desert, or if it ever would be—and then he wondered why he wondered.
When next he paused Khai heard a sound from somewhere not far ahead. At first, he thought it was the cry of a bird, but its paced regularity and rising, sobbing note was not the call of any creature he knew of. Moving carefully forward toward the source of the sound, he soon became aware that it was only one of a series, which as the distance between closed came more clearly to his ears. First there was a hissing, then a sharp crack followed immediately by the cry, and then the whole thing would repeat. And now Khai could make out that cry to be nothing less than a scream of agony. Someone was suffering a whipping!
Since the awful sounds were very close now, Khai proceeded with even greater caution. Presently, he came upon a natural clearing where, through a screen of ferns, he saw a scene of great cruelty. Inured as he had almost become to horrific sights, still the youth cringed at what he saw. From a slender tree near the center of the clearing hung the naked, lifeless body of a black man. A noose of rope was round his neck; his body was covered with blood from a dozen deep wounds; his sightless eyes hung out on his cheeks and the empty sockets were already full of flies. Khai shuddered unashamedly, knowing that the black had suffered hideously before he died.
There were six other blacks in the clearing, four males and two females, all naked. Five of them were bound and tied together with ropes, tethered to the same tree from which their former colleague now hung. They were slaves—or would be soon, when they had been sold in the slave-market in Asorbes—and their captors were Arabbans from across the Narrow Sea.
There were three hawk-faced, swarthy, turbaned Arabbans, one of whom wielded a vicious whip. At the moment, the three were gathered around a second tree to which was tied a bloodied, frizzle-headed thing which had been a man. Now he was a scarlet ruin whose upper torso was so badly flayed that Khai knew he must soon die. Blood flew as the slaver with the whip again used it on the black, but this time the hiss and crack of its delivery were not followed by a bubbling cry of agony. Instead, the Nubian’s bowels suddenly opened and excrement spattered down his legs and onto the bole of the tree.
One of the Arabbans stepped forward with an exclamation of disgust, jerked up the black’s limp head and stared into his face for a moment. Bulging, blood-flecked eyes were frozen in a blind stare. The slaver let the corpse’s head fall forward and turned to his companions.
“Dead!” he pronounced. “And that only leaves us with five. Well, what do you think? Have they learned their lesson—or will they try to run off again?”
The smallest of the three—whose growth had obviously been arrested or had deviated before he matured, making him stocky, short-legged, long-armed and generally apish—laughed as he took the whip from the speaker. “Why don’t we ask them?” he said, turning to the five remaining Nubians where they were bound to the other tree.
“Right, you lot,” the freakish slaver cried. “You’ve seen what happened to the leaders of your little revolution, and now you know what’ll happen to you if you make another run for it. We lost three days tracking you through the forest, but we caught you again in the end. We always will. By now our brothers have doubtless caught the rest of you, and we’ll be meeting up with them in Phemor. Ah!—but there’ll be faces you’ll never see again, I guarantee it. After Phemor, we go by boat downriver to Asorbes, where you’ll make all the work we’ve put in on you worthwhile.”
He pointed the stock of his whip at the men. “You three bucks will go into the slave quarters to work on Pharaoh’s pyramid. There’s plenty of your sort there already, so you’ll not feel out of it.” He laughed coarsely and reached out callused hands to pull at the breasts of the two girls, black jewels of great beauty. “As for you two: you’ll go to the highest bidder, whether it’s a madame from the whore house or a fatbellied merchant who likes a bit of black!”
The Arabban stepped back and surveyed the captives through eyes which had narrowed now to mere slits. “So you see, you won’t have such a hard time of it—if you’re good. But if you’re not—” He cracked his whip before the expressionless faces of the males, “then you’ll be getting this, like he got it,” and he pointed to the black and red thin
g tied to the other tree. “Or perhaps you’ll end up swinging,” and he used his shoulder to push against the dangling corpse, setting it slowly turning in mid-air.
“And you two—” he turned to the girls and parted his baggy breeches to produce a great log of a penis that flopped lazily into view. “Well, there’ll be a lot more of this for you two—and you’ll take it wherever it’s offered!”
At last, Khai saw emotion on the faces of the bound Nubian males. Until now they had seemed impassive, completely unaware or uncaring of their predicament, but when the girls were threatened their attitudes changed dramatically. Their dark eyes glinted dangerously and their black muscles flexed. Their bodies, bound though they were, seemed to tense like an animal’s before it springs on the back of its prey.
“Hah! You don’t like that, do you my buckos?” the dwarvish Arabban slapped his thigh in glee. “Well, you’d better get used to the idea, for that’s what these beauties are in for in Asorbes.” By now, his two companions had joined him and stood grinning, arms akimbo, watching him at his play. “Come to think of it,” the freak continued, “it’s been a long time since I had a bit myself, what with you lot running off and all.” He moved close to one of the girls, stepping up to her until his face was between her naked breasts. His penis stirred sluggishly against her knee. And again the blacks tensed, their muscles straining against tough, tight ropes.
Khai had seen enough of rape and torture, and he had never liked the swarthy Arabbans with their questionable habits and appetites and naturally cruel natures. As he had peeped out upon the savage tableau in the clearing, it had seemed to him that he was back in his hiding-place in the pyramid, gazing in on Khasathut’s “bridal chamber” and the horrors he had witnessed there. In the black figure dangling and turning in the air, he had seen the body of his father as it plummeted down the east face of the pyramid, flung like a rag doll by the God-king’s Black Guard, and in the threat posed to the bound girls he had relived the terror of his own sister’s ravishment atop the high, man-made plateau.
Now, as these red visions cleared from his head and he unconsciously found himself nocking an arrow, he saw that the three Arabbans were slowly and deliberately disrobing, and that already the two Nubian girls were wailing piteously and writhing in their bonds. He wasted no more time. The prisoners were Nubians, weren’t they? And wasn’t he hoping to start a new life in Nubia? Why not go there in triumph, as a hero?
The Arabbans, having stripped off their clothes and put aside their swords and belts, were now naked as the Nubians. Laughing, they converged on one of the quivering girls—
Khai’s first arrow took the stunted man in the spine, knocking him down like a swatted fly. The second of the slavers, in the act of loosening the girl’s ropes, saw the arrow strike home and instantly dropped into a defensive crouch, turning to face the wall of ferns. The third, hearing his colleague’s cry of warning, also turned—in time to take Khai’s second arrow in the breast. Coughing his amazement in a spray of scarlet, he fell to his knees and toppled forward onto his face, uncertain of what had happened even as he died.
The surviving slaver had had enough. Snatching up a sword and an armful of clothing, he went crashing through the ferns at the far side of the clearing and vanished into the forest, the sounds of his panic-flight rapidly growing fainter. Khai waited a moment longer, his third arrow nocked and ready, then slowly stood up and stepped out of the ferns into the glade.
He approached the astounded Nubians and looked at them for a second or two, then quickly took out his knife and set to work slicing at their bonds. As he worked, they began to fire a battery of questions at him in their own tongue, of which he understood only a few words. Then the eldest of the three, a barrel-chested man in his middle thirties, barked a word of command and the rest fell silent.
“Boy,” the Nubian now addressed Khai in broken Khemish, “were they truly your arrows brought down these dogs?”
Khai nodded and finished off his work by severing the bonds of one of the girls where her hands were tied behind her. “I killed them, yes,” he said, but he nevertheless kept his eyes averted from the bodies of the Arabbans where they lay.
“Huh!” The black nodded his appreciation. “Then you’re a fine bowman, lad, and we owe you our thanks. But why?” He took Khai’s shoulders in huge black hands and stared into his eyes. Then he frowned, saying: “Where are you from? You’re not . . . Khemish?”
“I was,” Khai answered truthfully, “but now I flee Khem. I flee the Pharaoh himself! I was befriended in Asorbes by Adonda Gomba, a Nubian slave—a king of slaves—and he gave me this.” He produced a small piece of leather with Gomba’s family sign branded into its center.
“Aye,” said the black, tenderly feeling his raw wrists, “the Gombas are strong in Abu-han. Is that where you’ll go, boy?”
“I would,” Khai answered with fervor. “I’d go anywhere rather than return to the great pyramid in Asorbes. And I’d do anything rather than face Anulep again, the Pharaoh’s Vizier—or worse still Khasathut himself!”
“And do you know the way to Nubia through the forests?”
“Of course! Don’t you?”
The black shook his head. “No. We were blindfolded when we were taken and they kept us that way for three days and nights. Only today the slavers told us where we were headed, though we had already guessed it; but even knowing our destination, still we are lost. We know nothing of these lands south of the great river.”
“Then let me lead you home!” cried Khai. “A Nubian befriended me in Asorbes, and should I not at least return the favour?”
The two younger blacks had taken up the curved bronze swords of the fallen Arabbans. Now they brandished them in the air and joined with the girls in a wild, whirling primitive dance about Khai, their blades glittering in the shafts of sunlight that lanced down through the surrounding trees. The dance finished as quickly as it had started and with a wild cry all of the Nubians, including the spokesman, flung themselves down at Khai’s feet.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“We honor you, young man!” cried their leader. “As all Nubia will honor you, if ever we can carry your story back there. What is your name?”
“I’m called Khai,” he answered in bewilderment.
“Well, then, Khai, we honor you.” The Nubian got to his feet and hugged the boy to him. “And you shall be called Khai of Khem—and they shall call you Khai the Killer!”
II
THE TRAP
As soon as the initial exuberance occasioned by their release wore off, the Nubians quickly quietened and turned to gaze at the horrific scene of torture and sudden death in the quiet forest glade.
Then they set about to bury their dead in a grief-stricken silence broken only by the quiet sobbing of the girls. One of these, the younger of the two—a beautiful girl who could not have been more than a year older than Khai at most—became so distraught that eventually she had to be lifted bodily from the grave of the man who had been hanged. Khai could only suppose that he had been her brother.
As for the bodies of the Arabbans: they were left to rot, or to be devoured by whichever scavengers might want them. And so, within an hour of Khai’s timely intervention, the party struck out in that southwesterly direction which the Khemite youth knew must sooner or later bring them back to the river where it formed the border between Khem and Nubia.
Perhaps it was because they were all fugitives together, but a strong bond of comradeship—one which seemed actually to transcend the debt owed to Khai—quickly formed between the blacks and the white boy. Trotting through the forest, the three male Nubians spaced themselves into a protective arrowhead formation about him, with the girls bringing up the rear. Thus the six of them loped on through the steadily lengthening shadows, and the forest grew more silent and shady yet as the miles flew beneath their feet.
Every now and then, they would pause for a few minutes or at least slow their pace to a walk, but never fo
r very long. They could not forget that one of the Arabbans had escaped Khai’s arrows, and no one could say how long it would be before more slavers came after them. During one of these comparatively short periods of walking, the Khemish-speaking black, Kindu, told Khai how the Arabbans had come across the river in force to attack the riverside villages of northern Nubia. The old people of the villages had been put to the sword, the babies, too, but the young men and women had been rounded up like so many head of cattle and made to build huge rafts.
Khai vividly remembered how, long ago, his father had drawn maps to show him the routes used by slavers bringing blacks out of Nubia; and even though he knew the rest of Kindu’s story before he heard it, still he listened to the tale in polite silence. As the black talked, Khai could see in his mind’s eye the massive rafts packed with prisoners, and he could follow the winding route they had taken down the river toward the third cataract in Khem itself.
Since the Nubians were a simple people and knew little of the geography of lands exterior to their own—and because the Arabbans had taken the additional precaution of blindfolding them—they would have been lost and confused long before the rafts were beached on the eastern bank upriver from the cataract. Still blindfolded, they would then have been force-marched through the forests in a northerly direction, skirting the cataract until they again met the river on the approach route to Phemor. In Phemor, there would be great Khemish barges waiting to float the slaves downriver to Asorbes, where finally they would come to journey’s end more than two hundred miles from the land of their birth.
And of course all of this was in complete defiance of the black king, N’jakka, and naturally Pharaoh would deny all knowledge of it. If ever N’jakka dared to accuse Khem directly, then the blame would be laid squarely upon the Arabbans, who must have crossed Khem from the east in secrecy to strike at Nubia unbeknown to Pharaoh and certainly without his consent. N’jakka could protest as much as he liked, but that would neither change matters nor return his people to their burned and ravaged villages.