For answer, Hylas called to Havoc, and the young lioness padded over and rubbed against him. She gave a cavernous yawn, baring enormous fangs. Hylas placed his hand on her massive golden head and turned to Kem, who couldn’t quite conceal his awe. ‘Because,’ Hylas said pleasantly, ‘if you don’t help us reach Pa-Sobek, Havoc here is going to get very, very hungry.’
They locked gazes. Again Kem tried to guess if Hylas was bluffing. Then he threw back his head and barked a laugh. ‘So! We help each other. Yes?’
‘How come you speak Akean?’ said Hylas, wiping snake grease off his chin.
Kem held up three fingers. ‘Three years hacking salt in the mines. My friend, he from your country. He drown dead in the lake when we escape.’ His voice was level. If he was sad, he gave no sign of it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Hylas.
Pirra didn’t say anything. She didn’t like Kem. He treated her as if she was some idiot girl to be ignored. ‘I never heard of anyone mining salt,’ she said suspiciously.
‘Not salt like the Sea,’ retorted Kem. ‘This sacred salt, Egyptians call it hesmen. They use it for everything – wash, heal, cover their dead so they live for ever.’ He prised a shred of meat from between his strong white teeth. ‘But for my friend, no hesmen. They chuck out his body for jackals to eat.’
‘That’s bad,’ said Hylas.
Kem hawked and spat. ‘The only people who matter to Egyptians are Egyptians. People from foreign, like us from Wawat, they think we not human.’
This was too much for Pirra. ‘Userref is Egyptian,’ she said hotly, ‘and he’s not like that!’
‘Oh no?’ sneered Kem.
‘No!’
‘For true? Who this Userref? He give you that scar?’
‘Shut up about my scar!’ she shouted.
‘Stop it, both of you,’ said Hylas.
Sensing that Pirra was upset, Echo flew in and settled on her shoulder. Havoc ambled over and leant against her, giving Kem a hard stare. Clearly, she also disliked this stranger in their midst.
Kem’s eyes flicked from Havoc to Hylas, to Pirra. He barked his mirthless laugh. ‘First, I thought you were gods. You with the lion, she with the hawk.’
‘Falcon,’ Pirra said coldly. ‘And that didn’t stop you stealing our waterskin.’
‘No, but it stopped me killing you for it.’
She opened her mouth to reply, but Hylas spoke first. ‘How long will it take to reach the Great River, Kem?’
The dark boy shrugged. ‘Three–four days, if you do what I say.’ His mouth twisted in a grin. ‘Lotta danger in the desert. Leopard, scorpion. You must be brave,’ he added with a glance at Pirra.
‘What’s a scorpion?’ she said between her teeth.
For answer, Kem snatched a stick from the fire, rooted around at the back of the cave, bashed something with a rock, then returned with it dangling from the stick. ‘This a scorpion.’ He waved it in her face.
She forced herself not to flinch. It was like a tiny black crayfish with a vicious-looking sting curled over its back. ‘Very impressive,’ she said drily. ‘Now tell us how to reach Pa-Sobek.’
‘Oh, it easy,’ Kem said sarcastically, chucking the scorpion in the fire. ‘First we cross the desert, then we get past the border guards. They watch for barbarians, runaway slaves. They get paid for each kill they can prove.’
‘Go on,’ said Hylas.
Kem looked at them angrily. ‘Here. I make you to know what is Egypt!’ With his finger, he drew an upside-down triangle in the sand, tapering to a long vertical line; it made Pirra think of a flower on a very long stalk. Kem pointed at the flat top of the triangle. ‘This the Sea. This,’ he outlined the triangle, ‘the mouth of the River. They call it Ta-Mehi, the Great Green. Huge papyrus marsh, lotta dangery animals: cobra, river horse, crocodile.’ His eyes met Pirra’s. ‘You know what is crocodile?’
‘Of course,’ she snapped.
He gave a disbelieving snort. ‘After Great Green, the River Valley.’ He ran his finger all the way down the stalk. ‘Very long, very dangery. River look sleepy, but it got rocks, currents, sandbanks. More river horse, more crocodile – and everywhere people: warrior, headmen, overseer. Egyptians got plenty food, but they always being counted and watched: how many crop you got? Where you going? Lotta boats on the River, but if a stranger ship try to go upstream, maybe one with big black sail, oh, they know it quick time!’ Lastly, he stabbed a point right at the bottom of the stalk. ‘There. Pa-Sobek.’
Pirra swallowed. ‘And your country – Wawat – that’s south of Pa-Sobek?’
Kem nodded.
Hylas was running his thumb over his bottom lip. ‘Where are we now?’
Kem jabbed at a point right up by the Sea and left of the Great Green. ‘Here.’
Silence. Pirra heard the crackle of the fire – and outside, the vast silence of the desert.
Hylas sat cross-legged with his hands on his knees. ‘Why did you mention strangers’ ships?’ he asked quietly.
Pirra threw him a puzzled glance.
Kem shrugged. ‘You go to Pa-Sobek, you need to steal a boat –’
‘But you said strangers’ ships with big black sails,’ said Hylas. ‘You were thinking of one in particular, weren’t you?’
Kem met that with one of his stubborn silences.
‘Kem,’ said Hylas. ‘There’s something you’re not telling us.’ He tapped the Crow tattoo on his forearm. ‘You’ve seen this before. Haven’t you?’
Kem stirred. Then he seemed to come to a decision. ‘Word travel, even among slaves. While ago, I hear tell of a stranger ship from Akea, the land of my friend. Black sails. Warriors. Bronze weapon, black cloak, mark like yours on they shield.’
Pirra couldn’t breathe. She smelt again the stink of warrior sweat and the bitter tang of the ash the Crows smeared on their skin.
In the leaping light, Hylas’ face was haunted. He was fingering the scar on his upper arm, where he’d dug out a Crow arrowhead two summers before. ‘Did you learn what they were after?’ he said hoarsely.
Again Kem shrugged. ‘People say they bring bronze for the Perao – Perao, he the headman of all Egypt. He need bronze to fight his enemies. So the ship come and Perao he take the bronze, and he let them go upriver –’
‘When?’ cut in Pirra. ‘How long ago did the ship get here?’
‘Long time,’ said Kem.
‘How long?’ cried Hylas and Pirra together.
‘Nearly two moons.’
Telamon whipped the horses and sent his chariot thundering after his quarry. The antelopes were straining every sinew as they raced across the desert – but he was gaining on them, and a doe was falling behind.
Passing reins and whip to Ilarkos, Telamon nocked an arrow to his bow. It struck the oryx in the neck and she fell, crashing head over hooves.
Ilarkos hauled the horses to a halt in clouds of red dust, and Telamon leapt down and finished her off with his knife.
‘Good shot, my lord,’ panted Ilarkos.
Telamon wanted to shout his triumph to the sky – but that would be boyish, so he just gave a curt nod.
The hunting party ran up, carrying his other kills: an ostrich, a leopard, and her two cubs.
Not bad for a morning’s hunt, thought Telamon. He nudged the oryx with his foot. ‘I only want the horn,’ he told Ilarkos. ‘See to it. I’m heading back.’
As the Sun rose, he thundered across the desert: through the gap in the great rocky ridge that loomed over the West Bank, past the fields and huddled villages of peasants and tomb-builders, and down to the River’s edge, where the Hati-aa’s barge was waiting.
Leaving the chariot and the exhausted horses for slaves to lead to the stables, he strode up the landing-plank and barked at the oarsmen to take him across to Pa-Sobek.
His spirits were high as he settled himself under the canopy, and he ran his hand along his jaw to feel his new beard, which was finally starting to grow. Yanking off his helmet, he admired its rows of ivory pla
ques sliced from the tusks of boars.
‘My helmet,’ he said proudly. He’d killed all twelve boars himself, and with the last, he’d become a man and a warrior.
He glanced at Pirra’s sealstone on his wrist, with its tiny amethyst falcon. ‘You sneered at me,’ he told her under his breath. ‘You called me a “Crow”. But I won’t be insulted, Pirra. I’m not a “Crow”, I’m a warrior of the House of Koronos. The Perao of all Egypt grants me safe-conduct, and the ruler of Pa-Sobek gives me a feast every night. What do you think of that?’
The East Bank was approaching, and before him lay Pa-Sobek, surrounded by green orchards and rich fields. He saw its tall white houses and bustling marketplace, shaded by the strange spiky trees they called date-palms; its stone jetty and tree-lined avenue guarded by giant basalt falcons – and beyond, its vast, secretive walled Temple.
Further along the bank lay the Hati-aa’s palace. It was far larger and more magnificent than Mycenae, where Telamon’s grandfather ruled – and yet it wasn’t even the main palace, that was upstream, on the border with Wawat. This one, in which Telamon and Alekto were increasingly impatient guests, was only where the Hati-aa stayed when he wished to be near the Temple.
But Telamon refused to be intimidated. He despised all Egyptians. They might be unimaginably rich, but they weren’t proper warriors. The Hati-aa had a garrison of men, but they didn’t wear helmets or armour, and until a few years ago, their weapons had been soft copper instead of bronze.
And the Hati-aa seemed more interested in plants. He kept slaves whose sole task was to tend trees and flowers and a fishpond in what he called a ‘garden’. He even had a smaller ‘garden’ in the courtyard inside the palace. Why? What for?
As for the Hati-aa himself, Telamon hadn’t seen him since he’d fallen ill and had left the care of his guests to his young wife, Meritamen. What kind of man leaves a girl of fourteen in charge?
Swallows were swooping over the courtyard as Telamon strode into the palace. Columns carved like papyrus flowers, cool passages tiled in green and yellow, a floor of polished gypsum, strewn with sweet clover to keep away flies.
The ‘garden’ before him was bright with pomegranate trees and blue cornflowers. White waterlilies floated in a green marble pool. The Hati-aa’s wife and her little sister were playing with their pets. As Telamon entered, they stopped and stared.
The little sister was six. Her head was shaven but for a braid at the temple, and she wore nothing except a blue bead belt. Telamon had never seen her without her cat.
The Hati-aa’s wife, Meritamen, was pretty in a way that reminded Telamon of the gazelle at her heels. She had large dark eyes rimmed with black, a fringe across her brow, and many tiny braids down her back. Her narrow dress of finely pleated white linen set off her smooth brown shoulders and hennaed feet.
To show her he was at ease, Telamon set his helmet on the ground and washed his head and hands in the pool.
The little sister scooped her cat into her arms and backed away. Meritamen placed a protective hand on her sister’s head. ‘Did you have a good hunt, Lord Tel-amon?’ she said quietly. She was the only member of the household who spoke Akean, having learnt it from her nurse. But she rarely looked Telamon in the face, which annoyed him. He was handsome, why couldn’t she see that?
‘A leopard and two cubs,’ he replied, wringing out his long warrior braids.
Suddenly, the child gave a muffled giggle. Meritamen glanced sideways – and gasped.
Telamon froze. The gazelle had just spattered a neat pile of pellets in his upturned helmet.
His blood roared in his ears. ‘The filthy …’ He lashed out with his foot, but the creature skittered off down a passage.
The little sister was desperately smothering her giggles in her cat’s fur. On the balcony above them, a slave snorted and clamped his hands to his mouth.
Meritamen was aghast. ‘I am – sorry, Lord Tel-amon.’ She snapped a command at a slave girl, who rushed forwards and shook out his helmet.
Telamon snatched it and stalked off, the laughter of slaves and women ringing in his ears.
It seemed to take ages to mount the stairs to the men’s quarters. In his chamber, he tore off his sweat-soiled tunic and shouted for water and wine. He’d never hated Egypt as intensely as he did now. Everyone looking down at him and laughing.
Even that slave, Userref, had laughed. Bloodied and beaten, he’d laughed his defiance in Telamon’s face. And in the end he’d found a way to escape.
And now the days were slipping by like the sands of this cursed desert, and Telamon was no closer to finding the dagger.
‘What did you slaughter this time?’ murmured Alekto as they sat together at the feast. ‘Did you finally kill a lion?’
Telamon bristled. She knew he hadn’t, she just wanted to make him say it. ‘I killed a leopard,’ he told her. ‘Like your beloved plaything.’
She laughed. The other day, her leopard had scratched her hand, and she’d had its throat cut.
‘Have you made any progress?’ snapped Telamon.
Alekto turned her head to accept a fig from Kerasher with a smile that made the Egyptian break out in a sweat. ‘I thought I had,’ she told Telamon. ‘My slave found a peasant who seemed promising, but his heart gave out.’ At the memory, she drew her lips back from her teeth in a way that was half smile and half grimace. She only smiled like that when she thought of pain – or, better still, when she observed it: beatings, wounds probed and stitched, the more agonizing the better. As long as there was pain.
Tonight she looked particularly beautiful, in a robe of scarlet silk and a sash of gilded calfskin, with gold snakes entwined in her dark hair. Telamon hated and feared her, but he understood now that his grandfather had been right to send her with him instead of Pharax. ‘Force won’t help you in Egypt,’ Koronos had said. ‘Egyptians admire beauty. Alekto will be more use to you than Pharax.’
Telamon had been daunted. ‘But how will we persuade them to find the dagger?’ And how would he survive in Egypt, that mysterious, unimaginably rich land at the end of the world, with only one ship and forty men?
‘The Perao wields enormous power,’ Koronos had said, ‘but not even he is secure. A few years ago, he rid his land of foreigners from the east – with my help. His army needed bronze, and I sold it to him. You will take him more bronze, and in return he will help you find the dagger.’
It had worked. With a shipful of bronze, Telamon had bought his way through the marshlands to the Perao’s astonishing palace of Waset, where the god-king Himself had granted them safe-conduct and Kerasher’s assistance. And Kerasher’s spies had tracked the slave Userref here to Pa-Sobek, the southernmost province of Egypt. But that had been over a moon ago.
A naked slave girl offered Telamon a dish of doum-palm nuts. He waved her away, then barked at her to bring drink.
Spiced pomegranate wine in a turquoise cup painted with black lotus flowers. Telamon forced it down. He was sick of feasts. The flutes, the incense, the ostrich-feather fans and the dancing girls’ bright naked limbs. Even the roast oxen drenched in cinnamon and sesame, and the rich white bread sweetened with dates.
He thought of the Perao’s safe-conduct: woven reeds they called a ‘scroll’, painted with tiny meaningless pictures that made him feel stupid. He didn’t want scrolls, he wanted the dagger of Koronos: to feel its power stiffening his sinews and kindling a fire in his blood …
‘I hear your helmet met with an accident,’ said Alekto.
Telamon threw her a cold look. ‘What have you done all day, apart from torturing peasants?’
With her fingernail, she slit the dusky skin of the fig and sniffed its purple flesh. ‘Meritamen is young and inexperienced. But I think she knows something.’
‘Why didn’t you find out sooner?’
‘Be patient, nephew –’
‘I’m sick of being patient!’ Telamon slammed down his cup with a crash that stopped the music and turned heads around t
he hall. ‘This has gone on long enough! From now on, we do it my way!’
‘I won’t wait any longer,’ said Telamon when the hall had been cleared of all except Alekto, Kerasher and Meritamen, who sat tensely in the Hati-aa’s ebony chair. ‘I’m convinced that our dagger is in the Temple,’ Telamon went on. ‘No more delay. You must have it searched.’
Meritamen glanced at Kerasher, who gave her a weary smile, as if Telamon had said something particularly stupid. ‘Noble Lord Telamon,’ he began. ‘Not even I or the Lady Meritamen may do that. We may not even enter the Temple! Only priests – servants of the gods – are allowed within. And they swear they do not have your amulet.’
‘Dagger,’ corrected Telamon.
The Egyptian acknowledged his error with a bow that was almost a shrug.
Alekto spoke to Meritamen. ‘Please tell me why, if the dagger isn’t in the Temple, there’s so much coming and going around it?’
Telamon resented her butting in. And Meritamen’s answer was infuriatingly off the point. ‘Every year,’ she said carefully, ‘the gods cause the Great River to rise. This takes many days, but at last the River covers the land. We call this Akhet: the Time of the Flood.’
Telamon stirred impatiently.
‘When the waters finally recede,’ Meritamen went on, ‘they leave our fields covered in rich black mud. Thus Egypt is reborn, as it has been every year since the beginning –’
‘What’s this got to do with the dagger?’ broke in Telamon.
‘The start of the Flood,’ said Kerasher, ‘is the start of the New Year: the most important time. We hold a great heb, a festival. The heb of the First Drop is only a few days away.’
‘Which is why,’ Meritamen said patiently, ‘there is so much coming and going in the Temple.’
‘But surely,’ said Alekto, ‘as ruler of Pa-Sobek in your husband’s place, you can order the priests –’
‘Ah no!’ chuckled Kerasher, waving with his ebony fly-whisk. ‘The priests don’t serve the Lady Meritamen – they serve the gods!’
Telamon was struggling to keep his temper. ‘I don’t think either of you understands. I am the grandson of Koronos, High Chieftain of Mycenae. The Lady Alekto is the High Chieftain’s daughter.’