River god

RIVER GOD

Wilbur Smith

This book, like so many others before it, is for my wife, Danielle Antoinette.

The Nile that flows through this story has both of us in her thrall. We have spent days of delight voyaging together upon her waters and idling upon her banks. As we are, so is she a creature of this very Africa of ours.

Yet this great river runs neither so strongly nor so deeply as my love for you, my darling.

THE RIVER LAY HEAVILY UPON THE desert, bright as a spill of molten metal from a furnace. The sky smoked with heat-haze and the sun beat down upon it all with the strokes of a coppersmith's hammer, hi the mirage the gaunt hills flanking the Nile seemed to tremble to the blows. Our boat sped close in beside the papyrus beds; near enough for the creaking of the water buckets of the shadoof, on their long, counter-balanced arms, to carry from the fields across the water. The sound harmonized with the singing of the girl in the bows.

Lostris was fourteen years of age. The Nile had begun its latest flood on the very day that her red woman's moon had flowered for the first time, a coincidence that the priests of Hapi had viewed as highly propitious. Lostris, the woman's name that they had then chosen to replace her discarded baby-name, meant 'Daughter of the Waters'.

I remember her so vividly on that day. She would grow more beautiful as the years passed, become more poised and regal, but never again would that glow of virgin womanhood radiate from her so overpoweringly. Every man aboard, even the warriors at the rowing-benches, were aware of it. Neither I nor any one of them could keep our gaze off her. She filled me with a sense of my own inadequacy and a deep and poignant longing; for although I am a eunuch I was gelded only after I had known the joy of a woman's body.

Taita,' she called to me, 'sing with me!' And when I obeyed she smiled with pleasure. My voice was one of the many reasons that, whenever she was able, she kept me near her; my tenor complemented her lovely soprano to perfection. We sang one of the old peasant love songs that I had taught her, and which was still one of her favourites:

My heart flutters up like a wounded quail

when I see my beloved's face

and my cheeks bloom like the dawn sky

to the sunshine of his smile?

From the stern another voice joined with ours. It was a man's voice, deep and powerful, but it lacked the clarity and purity of my own. If my voice was that of a dawn-greeting thrush, men this was the voice of a young lion.

Lostris turned her head and now her smile shimmered like the sunbeams on the surface of the Nile. Although the man upon whom she played that smile was my friend, perhaps my only true friend, still I felt the bitter gall of envy bum the back of my throat. Yet I forced myself to smile at Tanus, as she did, with love.

Tanus' father, Pianki, Lord Harrab, had been one of the grandees of the Egyptian nobility, but his mother had been the daughter of a freed Tehenu slave. Like so many of her people, she had been fair-headed and blue-eyed. She had died of the swamp fever while Tanus was still a child, so my memory of her was imperfect. However, the old women said that seldom before had such beauty as hers been seen in either of the two kingdoms.

On the other hand, I had known and admired Tanus' father, before he lost all his vast fortune and the great estates that had once almost rivalled those of Pharaoh himself. He had been of dark complexion, with Egyptian eyes the colour of polished obsidian, a man with more physical strength than beauty, but with a generous and noble heart?some might say too generous and too trusting, for he had died destitute, with his heart broken by those he had thought his friends, alone in the darkness, cut off from the sunshine of Pharaoh's favour.

Thus it seemed that Tanus had inherited the best from both his parents, except only worldly wealth, hi nature and in power he was as his father; in beauty as his mother. So why should I resent my mistress loving him? I loved him also, and, poor neutered thing that I am, I knew that I could never have her for myself, not even if the gods had raised my status above that of slave. Yet such is the perversity of human nature that I hungered for what I could never have and dreamed of the impossible.

Lostris sat on her cushion on the prow with her slave girls sprawled at her feet, two little black girls from Cush, lithe as panthers, entirely naked except for the golden collars around their necks. Lostris herself wore only a skirt of bleached linen, crisp and white as an egret's wing. The skin of her upper body, caressed by the sun, was the colour of oiled cedar wood from the mountains beyond Byblos. Her breasts were the size and shape of ripe figs just ready for plucking, and tipped with rose garnets.

She had set aside her formal wig, and wore her natural hair in a side-lock that fell in a thick dark rope over one breast. The slant of her eyes was enhanced by the silver-green of powdered malachite cunningly touched to the upper lids. The colour of her eyes was green also, but the darker, clearer green of the Nile when its waters have shrunk and deposited their burden of precious silts. Between her breasts, suspended on a gold chain, she wore a figurine of Hapi, the goddess of the Nile, fashioned in gold and precious lapis lazuli. Of course it was a superb piece, for I had made it with my own hands for her.

Suddenly Tanus lifted his right hand with the fist clenched. As a single man the rowers checked their stroke and held the blades of their paddles aloft, glinting in the sunlight and dripping water. Then Tanus thrust the steering-oar hard over, and the men on the port bank stabbed their backstroke deeply, creating a series of tiny whirlpools in the surface of the green water. The starboard side pulled strongly ahead. The boat spun so sharply that the deck canted over at an alarming angle. Then both banks pulled together and she shot forward. The sharp prow, with the blue eyes of Horus emblazoned upon it, brushed aside the dense stands of papyrus, and she lanced her way out of the flow of the river and into the still waters of the lagoon beyond.

Lostris broke off the song and shaded her eyes to gaze ahead. 'There they are!' she cried, and pointed with a graceful little hand. The other boats of Tanus' squadron were cast like a net across the southern reaches of the lagoon, blocking the main entrance to the great river, cutting off any escape in that direction.

Naturally, Tanus had chosen for himself the northern station, for he knew that this was where the sport would be most furious. I wished it was not so. Not that I am a coward, but I have always the safety of my mistress to consider. She had inveigled herself aboard the Breath of Horus only after much intrigue in which, as always, she had deeply involved me. When her father learned, as he surely would, of her presence in the thick of the hunt, it would go badly enough for me, but if he learned also that I was responsible for allowing her to be in the company of Tanus for a full day, not even my privileged position would protect me from his wrath. His instructions to me regarding this young man were unequivocal.

However, I seemed to be the only soul aboard the Breath of Horus who was perturbed. The others were simmering with excitement. Tanus checked the rowers with a peremptory hand-signal, and the boat glided to a halt and lay rocking gently upon the green waters that were so still that when I glanced overboard and saw my own reflection look back at me, I was struck, as always, by how well my beauty had carried over the years. To me it seemed that my face was more lovely than the cerulean blue lotus blooms that framed it. I had little time to admire it, however, for the crew were all abustle.

One of Tanus' staff officers ran up his personal standard to the masthead. It was the image of a blue crocodile, with its great coxcombed tail held erect and its jaws open. Only an officer of the rank of Best of Ten Thousand was entitled to his own standard. Tanus had achieved such rank, together with the command of the Blue Crocodile division of Pharaoh's own elite guard, before his twentieth birthday.

Now the standard at the masthead was the signal for the hunt to begin. On the horizon of the lagoon the rest of the squadron were tiny with distance, but their paddles began to beat rhythmically, rising and falling like the wings of wild geese in flight, glistening in the sunlight. From their sterns the multiple wavelets of their wakes were drawn out across the placid waters and lay for a long while on the surface, as though moulded from solid clay.

Tanus lowered the gong over the stem. It was a long bronze tube. He allowed the end of it to sink below the surface. When struck with a hammer of the same metal the shrill, reverberating tones would be transmitted through the water, filling our quarry with consternation. Unhappily for my equanimity, I knew that this could readily turn to a murderous rage.

Tanus laughed at me. Even in his own excitation he had sensed my qualms. For a rude soldier he had unusual perception. 'Come up here in the stern-tower, Taita!' he ordered. 'You can beat the gong for us. It will take your mind off the safety of your own beautiful hide for a while.'

I was hurt by his levity, but relieved by the invitation, for the stern-tower is high above the water. I moved to do his bidding without undignified haste, and,'as I passed him, I paused to exhort him sternly, 'Have a care for the safety of my mistress. Do you hear me, boy? Do not encourage her to recklessness, for she is every bit as wild as you are.' I could speak thus to an illustrious commander of ten thousand, for he was once my pupil and I had wielded the cane on more than one occasion across those martial buttocks. He grinned at me now as he had in those days, as cocky and impudent as ever.

'Leave that lady in my hands, I implore you, old friend. There is nothing I would relish more, believe me!' I did not admonish him for such a disrespectful tone, for I was in some small haste to take my place in the tower. From there I watched him take up his bow.

Already that bow was famous throughout the army, indeed throughout the length of the great river from the cataracts to the sea. I had designed it for him when he had grown dissatisfied with the puny weapons that, up until that time, were all that were available to him. I had suggested that we should try to fashion a bow with some new material other than those feeble woods that grow in our narrow riverine valley; perhaps with exotic timbers such as the heart-wood of the olive from the land of the Hittites or of the ebony from Cush; or with even stranger materials such as the horn of the rhinoceros or the ivory tusk of the elephant.

No sooner had we made the attempt than we came upon a myriad of problems, the first of which was the brittleness of these exotic materials. In their natural state none of them would bend without cracking, and only the largest and therefore the most expensive elephant tusk would allow us to carve a complete bowstock from it. I solved both these problems by splitting the ivory of a smaller tusk into slivers and gluing these together in sufficient girth and bulk to form a full bow. Unfortunately it was too rigid for any man to draw.

However, from there it was an easy and natural step to laminate together all four of our chosen materials?olive wood, ebony, horn and ivory. Of course, there were many months of experimentation with combinations of these materials, and with various types of glue to hold them together. We never did succeed in making a glue strong enough. In the end I solved this last problem by binding the entire bowstock with electrum wire to prevent it from flying apart. I had two big men assist Tanus in twisting the wire on to it with all their combined strength, while the glue was still hot. When it cooled, it set to an almost perfect combination of strength and pliability.

Then I cut strands from the gut of a great black-maned lion that Tanus hunted and killed with his bronze-bladed war spear out in the desert. These I tanned and twisted together to form a bowstring. The result was this gleaming arc of such extraordinary power that only one man out of all the hundreds who had made the attempt could draw it to full stretch.

The regulation style of archery as taught by the army instructors was to face the target and draw the nocked arrow to the sternum of the chest, hold that aim for a deliberate pause, then loose on command. However, not even Tanus had the strength to draw this bow and hold his aim steadily. He was forced to develop a completely new style. Standing sideways to the target, addressing it over his left shoulder, he would throw up the bow with his left arm outstretched and, with a convulsive heave, draw back the arrow until the feathered flights touched his lips and the muscles of his arms and chest stood proud with the effort. In that same instant of full extension, seemingly without aiming, he would loose.

At first, his arrovlfe flew at random as wild bees leave the hive, but he practised day after day and month after month.

The fingers of his right hand became raw and bleeding from the chafing of the bowstring, but they healed and toughened. The inside of his left forearm was bruised and excoriated where the bowstring slashed past it on the release of the arrow, but I fashioned a leather guard to protect it. And Tanus stood at the butts and practised and practised.

Even I lost confidence in his ability to master the weapon but Tanus never gave up. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, he gained control of it to the point where, finally, he could launch three arrows with such rapidity that they were all in the air at the same instant. At least two of the three would strike the target, a copper disc the size of a man's head set up at a distance of fifty paces from where Tanus stood. Such was the force of those arrows that they would fly cleanly through the metal which was the thickness of my little finger.

Tanus named this mighty weapon Lanata which was, quite coincidentally, the discarded baby-name of my mistress. Now he stood in the bows with the woman at his side, and her namesake in his left hand. They made a marvellous couple, but too obviously so for my peace of mind.

I called sharply, 'Mistress! Come back here immediately! It is unsafe where you are.' She did not even deign to glance over her shoulder, but made a sign at me behind her back. Every one of the crew of the galley saw it, and the boldest of them guffawed. One of those little black vixens that were her handmaidens must have taught Lostris that gesture, which was more appropriate to the ladies of the riverside taverns than to a high-born daughter of the House of Intef. I considered remonstrating with her, but at once abandoned such an imprudent course, for my mistress is amenable to restraint only in certain of her moods. Instead, I applied myself to beating the bronze gong with sufficient vigour to disguise my chagrin.

The shrill, reverberating tone carried across the glassy waters of the lagoon, and instantly the air was filled with the susurration of wings and a shade was cast over the sun as, from the papyrus beds and the hidden pools and open water, a vast cloud of water-fowl rose into the sky. They were of a hundred varieties: black and white ibis with vulturine heads, sacred to the goddess of the river; flights of honking geese in russet plumage, each with a ruby droplet in the centre of its chest; herons of greenish-blue or midnight black, with bills like swords and ponderous wing-beats; and ducks in such profusion that their numbers challenged the eye and the credibility of the beholder.

Wild-fowling is one of the most ardent pursuits of the Egyptian nobility, but that day we were after different game. At that moment, I saw far ahead a disturbance upon the glassy surface. It was weighty and massive, and my spirits quailed, for I knew what terrible beast had moved there. Tanus also had seen it, but his reaction was altogether different from mine. He gave tongue like a hunting hound, and his men shouted with him and bent to their paddles. The Breath ofHorus shot forward as though she were one of the birds that darkened the sky above us, and my mistress shrieked with excitement and beat with one small fist upon Tanus' muscled shoulder.

The waters roiled once more and Tanus signalled to his steersman to follow the movement, while I hammered upon the gong to bolster and sustain my courage. We reached the spot where last we had seen movement, and the vessel glided to a standstill while every man upon her decks gazed around eagerly.

I alone glanced directly over the stem. The water beneath our hull was shallow and almost as clear as the air above us. I shrieked as loudly and as shrilly as my mistress had and leapt back from the stem-rail, for the monster was directly under us.

The hippopotamus is the familiar of Hapi, the goddess of the Nile. It was only with her special dispensation that we could hunt it. To that end Tanus had prayed and sacrificed at the goddess's temple that morning, with my mistress close by his side. Of course, Hapi is her patron goddess, but I doubted that alone was the reason for her avid participation in the ceremony.

The beast that I saw beneath us now was an enormous old bull. To my eye, he seemed as large as our galley, a gigantic shape that lumbered along the bottom of the lagoon, his movements slowed down by the drag of the water so that he moyed like a creature from a nightmare. He raised puffs of mud from beneath his hooves the same way that a wild oryx stirs the dust as it races across the desert sands.

With the steering-oar Tanus spun the boat about and we sped after the bull. But even at that slow and mannered gallop he rapidly drew away from us. His dark shape faded into the green depths of the lagoon ahead of us.

'Pull! By Seth's foul breath, pull!' Tanus howled at his men, but when one of his officers shook out the knotted lash of the whip, Tanus frowned and shook his head. I have never seen him ply the lash where it was not warranted.

Suddenly the bull broke through the surface ahead of us and blew a great cloud of fetid steam from his lungs. The stink of it washed over us, even though he was well out of bowshot. For a moment his back formed a gleaming granite island in the lagoon, then he drew a whistling breath and with a swirl was gone again.

'After him!' Tanus bellowed.

'There he is,' I cried, as I pointed over the side, 'he's doubling back.'

'Well done, old friend,' Tanus laughed at me, 'we'll make a warrior of you yet.' That notion was ridiculous, for I am a scribe, a sage and an artist. My heroics are of the mind. None the less, I felt a thrill of pleasure, as I always do at Tanus' praise, and my trepidation was, for the moment, lost in the excitement of the chase.

To the south of us the other galleys of the squadron had joined the hunt. The priests of Hapi had kept a strict count of the number of these great beasts in the lagoon, and had given sanction for fifty of them to be slaughtered for the coming festival of Osiris. This would leave almost three hundred of the goddess's flock remaining in the temple lagoon, a number that the priests considered ideal to keep the waterways free of choking weed, to prevent the papyrus beds from encroaching upon the arable lands and to provide a regular supply of meat for the temple. Only the priests themselves were allowed to eat the flesh of the hippopotamus outside the ten days of the festival of Osiris.

So the hunt spun out across the waters like some intricate dance, with the ships of the squadron weaving and pirouetting while the frenzied beasts fled before them, diving and blowing and grunting as they surfaced to dive again. Yet each dive was shorter than the last, and the swirling breaches at the surface became more frequent as their lungs were emptied and could not be fully recharged before the pursuing ships bore down upon them and forced them to dive again. All the while the bronze gongs in the stern-tower of each galley rang out to blend with the excited cries of the rowers and the exhortations of the helmsmen. All was wild uproar and confusion and I found myself shouting and cheering along with the most bloodthirsty of them.

Tanus had concentrated all his attention on the first and largest bull. He ignored the females and younger animals that breached within bowshot, and followed the great beast through all his convolutions, drawing inexorably closer to him each time he surfaced. Even in my excitation I could not but admire the skill with which Tanus handled the Breath of Horus and the manner in which his crew responded to his signals. But then, he always had the knack of getting the very best out of those he commanded. How otherwise, with neither fortune nor great patron to sustain him, could he have risen so swiftly to exalted rank? What he had achieved he had done on his own merit, and that despite the malignant influence of hidden enemies who had placed every obstacle in his way.

Suddenly the bull burst through the surface not thirty paces from the bows. He came out gleaming in the sunshine, monstrous black and awful, clouds of steamy vapour spurting from his nostrils like that creature from the underworld that devours the hearts of those who are found wanting by the gods.

Tanus had an arrow nocked and now he threw up the great bow and loosed it in the same fleeting instant. Lanata played her dreadful shimmering music, and the arrow leaped out in a blur that deceived the eye. While it still hissed in flight, another followed it and then another. The bowstring hummed like a lute, and the arrows struck one after the other. The bull bellowed as they buried themselves full-length in his broad back, and he dived again.

These were missiles that I had devised especially for this occasion. The feathered flights had been removed from the arrows and replaced by tiny floats of baobab wood such as the fisherman use to buoy their nets. They slipped over the butt of the shaft in such a way that they were secure in flight but would become dislodged once the beast dived and dragged them through the water. They were attached to the bronze arrow-head by a fine linen thread that was wound around the shaft, but which unravelled once the float was detached. So now, as the bull sped away beneath the water, the three tiny floats popped to the surface and bobbed along behind him. I had painted them bright yellow so that the eye was drawn to them and the bull's position was instantly revealed, even though he was deep in the lagoon.

Thus Tanus was able to anticipate each of the bull's wild rushes and to send the Breath of Horus speeding to head him off and to place another set of arrows deep in the glistening black back as it bulged out of the water. By now the bull was towing a garland of pretty yellow corks behind him, and the waters were streaking and swirling red with his blood. Despite the wild emotions of the moment I could not help but feel pity for the stricken creature each time it came bellowing to the surface to be met by another hail of the deadly hissing arrows. My sympathy was not shared by my young mistress, who was in the very thick of the fray and shrieking with the delicious terror and excitement of it all.

Once again the bull came up dead ahead, but this time facing the Breath of Horus as she bore down upon him. His jaws gaped so wide that I could see far down his throat. It was a tunnel of bright red flesh that could easily have engulfed a man entirely. The jaws were lined with such an array of fangs that my breath stopped and my flesh chilled. In his bottom jaw they were huge ivory sickles designed to harvest the tough and sinewy stalks of standing papyrus. In his upper jaw they were gleaming white shafts as thick as my wrist that could shear through the hull timbers of the Breath of Horus as easily as I would bite through a cake of cornflour. I had recently had the opportunity of examining the corpse of a peasant woman who, while cutting papyrus on the river-bank, had disturbed a cow hippo that had just given birth to a calf. The woman had been severed in half so neatly that it seemed she had been struck with the keenest of bronze blades.

Now this enraged monster with his maw filled with these gleaming teeth was bearing down upon us, and even though I was high in the stem-tower and as far from him as I could possibly be, yet I found myself as incapable of sound or movement as a temple statue, frozen with terror.

Tanus loosed yet another arrow which flew squarely down the gaping throat, yet the creature's agony was already so terrible that he seemed not to notice this further injury, although it must eventually prove fatal. He charged without check or hesitation straight at the bows of the Breath of Horus. Such a fearsome roar of fury and of mortal anguish issued from the tortured throat that an artery ruptured deep within it and gouts of blood were sent spraying from his open jaws. The spewing blood turned to clouds of red mist in the sunlight, both beautiful and horrible at the same time. Then the bull crashed headlong into the bows of our galley.

The Breath of Horus was cutting through the water at the speed of a running gazelle, but the bull was even swifter in his rage and his bulk was so solid that it seemed as though we had run aground on a rocky shore. The rowers were sent sprawling from their benches, while I was hurled forwards with such force against the rail of the stern-tower that the air was driven from my lungs and replaced by a solid rock of pain in my chest.

Yet even in rny own distress my concern was all for my mistress. Through tears of agony I saw her flung forward by the impact, 'fcnus threw out his arm to try to save her, but he was also off-balance from the shock, and the bow in his left hand hindered him. He was only able to check her impetus for a moment, but then she teetered at the rail with her arms windmilling desperately, and her back arched out over the drop.

'Tanus!' she screamed, and reached out one hand to him. He recovered his balance with the nimbleness of an acrobat and tried to catch her hand. For an instant their fingers touched, then it seemed that she was plucked away and dashed over the side.

From my elevated position in the stern I was able to follow her fall. She flipped over in the air like a cat, and the white skirts streamed upwards to expose the exquisite length of her thighs. To me it seemed that she fell for ever, and my own anguished cry blended with her despairing wail.

'My baby!' I cried. 'My little one!' For I was certain that she was lost. It seemed that all 'her life, as I had known it, replayed itself before my eyes. I saw her again as a toddling infant and heard the baby endearments that she bestowed on me, her adoring nursemaid. I saw her grow to womanhood, and I remembered every joy and every heartache that she had caused me. I loved her then in the moment of losing her even more than I had done in all those fourteen long years.

She fell upon the vast, blood-splattered back of the infuriated bull, and for an instant lay spread-eagled there like a human sacrifice upon the altar of some obscene religion. The bull whirled about, mounting high out of the water, and he twisted his huge deformed head backwards, trying to reach her. His bloodshot piggy eyes glared with the insanity of his rage, and his great jaws clashed as he snapped at her.

Somehow Lostris managed to gather herself and cling to a pair of the arrow-shafts that protruded from the bull's broad back as though they were handles. She lay with her arms and legs spread wide. She was not screaming now, all her art and strength employed in staying alive. Those curved ivory fangs rang upon each other like the blades of duelling warriors as they gnashed in air. At each bite they seemed to miss her by only a finger's-breadth, and any instant I expected one of her lovely limbs to be pruned away like a delicate shoot from the vine, and to see her sweet young blood mingle with those brutish effusions that streamed from the bull's wounds.

In the prow Tanus recovered swiftly. For an instant I saw his face and it was terrible. He tossed aside the bow, for it was useless to him now, and he seized instead the hilt of his sword and jerked the blade free of its crocodile-skin scabbard. It was a gleaming length of bronze as long as his arm, and the edges were honed until they could shave the hair from the back of his hand.

He leaped up on to the gunwale and balanced there for an instant, watching the wild gyrations of the mortally wounded bull in the water below him. Then he launched himself outwards and dropped like a stooping falcon with the sword held in both hands and pointing downwards.

He dropped across the bull's thick neck, landing astride it as though he were about to ride it into the underworld.

The full weight of his body and the impetus of that wild leap were behind the sword as he struck. Half the length of the blade was driven into the hippopotamus's neck at the base of the skull, and, seated upon it like a rider, Tanus worried and worked the keen bronze deeper, using both arms and the strength of those broad shoulders. At the goad of the blade the bull went berserk. His strivings up to that point seemed feeble in comparison to this fresh outburst. The bull reared most of his enormous bulk out of the lagoon, swinging his head from side to side, throwing solid sheets of water so high in the air that they crashed down on the deck of the galley and, like a curtain, almost obscured the scene from my horrified gaze.

Through it all I watched the couple on the monster's back tossed about mercilessly. The shaft of one of the arrows that Lostris was holding snapped, and she was almost thrown clear. If this had happened she would surely have been savaged by the bull and chopped into bloody tatters by those ivory fangs. Tanus reached backwards and with one arm seized and steadied her, while with his right hand he never ceased working the broifce blade deeper into the nape of the bull's neck.

Unable to reach them, the hippopotamus slashed at his own flanks, inflicting terrible gaping wounds in his sides so that for fifty paces around the galley the waters were incarnadined, and both Lostris and Tanus were painted entirely crimson from the tops of their heads to the soles of their feet by the spurting blood. Then- faces were turned to grotesque masks from which their eyes whitely glared.

The violent death-throes of the bull had carried them far from the galley's side, and I was the first aboard to recover my wits. I yelled to the rowers, 'Follow them! Don't let them get away,' and they sprang to their stations and sent the Breath of Horus in pursuit.

At that instant it seemed that the point of Tanus' blade must have found the joint of the vertebrae in the breast's neck and slipped through. The immense carcass stiffened and froze. The bull rolled on to his back with all four legs extended rigidly, and he plunged below the waters of the lagoon, bearing Lostris and Tanus with him into the depths.

I choked back the wail of despair that rose in my throat, and bellowed an order to the deck below. 'Back-water! Do not overrun them! Swimmers to the bows!' Even I was startled by the power and authority of my own voice.

The galley's forward way was checked, and before I could reflect on the prudence of what I was doing, I found myself heading a rush of hulking warriors across the deck. They would probably have cheered while they watched any other officer drown, but not their Tanus.

As for myself, I had already stripped off my skirt and was naked. Not the threat of a hundred lashes would have made me do this in any other circumstances, for I have let only one other person ever see those injuries that the state executioner inflicted upon me so long ago, and he was the one who had ordered the castrating knife used upon me in the first place. But now, for once, I was totally oblivious of the gross mutilation of my manhood.

I am a strong swimmer, and although in retrospect such foolhardiness makes me shudder, I truly believe that I might have dived over the side and swum down through those blood-dyed waters in an attempt to rescue my mistress. However, as I poised myself at the ship's rail, the waters directly below me opened and two heads bobbed out, both of them streaming water and as close as a pair of mating otters. One was dark and the other fair, but from both of them issued the most unlikely sound I had ever heard. They were laughing. They were howling and shrieking and spluttering with laughter as they floundered towards the ship's side, locked so firmly in each other's arms that I was certain that they were in real danger of drowning one another.

All my concern turned instantly to outrage at this levity, and at the thought of the dreadful folly which I had been on the point of committing. Like a mother whose first instinct on finding her lost child is to thrash it, I heard my own voice lose all its previous deep authority and turn shrill and querulous. I was still berating my mistress with all my famous eloquence as she and Tanus were dragged by a dozen willing hands from the water on to the deck.

'You reckless, unbridled little savage!' I railed at her. 'You thoughtless, selfish, undisciplined little hoyden! You promised me! You swore an oath on the maidenhead of the goddess?'

She ran to me and threw both arms around my neck. 'Oh, Taita!' she cried, still bubbling with laughter. 'Did you see him? Did you see Tanus spring to my rescue? Was it not the noblest deed that ever you heard of? Just like the hero of one of your very best stories.'

The fact that I had been on the point of making a similar heroic gesture was quite ignored, and this only increased my irritation. Added to which I suddenly realized that Lostris had lost her skirt, and that the cold, wet body she pressed to mine was entirely naked. She was displaying to the rude gaze of officers and men the neatest, tightest pair of buttocks in all Egypt.

I snatched up the nearest shield and used it to cover both our bodies while I shouted at her slave girls to find another skirt for her. Their giggles only increased my fury, and as soon as both Lostris and I were once again decently covered, I rounded on Tanus.

'As for you, you careless ruffian, I shall report you to my Lord Intef! He will have the skin flogged from your back.'

'You will do no sucff thing,' Tanus laughed at me, and threw one wet muscled arm around my shoulders to hug me so soundly that I was lifted off my feet, 'for he would have you flogged just as merrily. Nevertheless, thank you for your concern, old friend.'

He looked around quickly, with one arm still encircling my shoulder, and frowned. The Breath of Horus was separated from the other ships of the squadron, but by now the hunt was over. Every galley but ours had taken its full share of the bag that the priests had sanctioned us.

Tanus shook his head. 'We did not make the most of our chances, did we?' he grunted, and ordered one of his officers to hoist the recall signal to the squadron.

Then he forced a smile. 'Let us broach a jug of beer together, for now we have a while to wait and this has been thirsty work.' He went to the bows where the slave girls were fussing over Lostris. At first I was still so angry that I would not join their impromptu picnic on the deck. Instead I maintained an aloof dignity in the stern.

'Oh, let him sulk a while,' I heard Lostris' stage-whisper to Tanus as she recharged his cup with foaming beer. "The old darling gave himself an awful scare, but he will get over it as soon as he is hungry. He does so love his food.'

She is the epitome of injustice, is my mistress. I never sulk, I am no glutton, and at that time I was barely thirty years of age, although to a fourteen-year-old anyone above twenty is an ancient, and I admit that, when it comes to food, I do have the refined tastes of a connoisseur. The roast wild goose with figs that she was ostentatiously displaying was one of my favourite dishes, as she very well knew.

I made them suffer for a while longer, and it was only when Tanus brought me a jug of beer with his own hand and cajoled me with all his charm that I deigned to relent a little and let him lead me to the prow. Still, I was a little stiff with them until Lostris kissed my cheek and said, loud enough for all to hear, 'My girls tell me that you took command of the ship like a veteran, and that you would have dived overboard to rescue me. Oh, Taita, what would I ever do without you?' Only then would I smile at her and accept the slice of goose she pressed upon me. It was delicious, and the beer was of three-palm quality. Even so, I ate sparingly, for I have my figure to consider and her earlier jibe about my appetite still rankled a little.

Tanus' squadron was scattered widely across the lagoon, but now it began to regroup. I saw that some of the other galleys had suffered damage, as we had. Two ships had collided in the heat of the chase, while four others had been attacked by the quarry. However, they reassembled swiftly and took up their battle stations. Then, in line astern and with strings of gay pennants fluttering at the mastheads to proclaim the size of each galley's bag, they dashed past us. The crews raised a cheer as they came level with the Breath of Horus. Tanus saluted them with a clenched fist and the Blue Crocodile standard was dipped at the masthead, for all the world as though we had just achieved a famous victory against daunting odds. Boyish display, perhaps, but then I am still enough of a boy to enjoy military ceremonial.

As soon as it was over, the squadron resumed its battle stations and was holding its position against the light breeze that had sprung up, with skilful use of paddles and steering-oars. Of course, there was no sign of the slaughtered hippopotami as yet. Although every galley had killed at least one, while some had killed two and even three, the carcasses had all sunk away into the green depths of the lagoon. I knew that Tanus was secretly lamenting the fact that the Breath ofHorus had not been the most successful boat, and that our protracted encounter with the bull had limited our score to only that single animal. He was accustomed to excelling. Anyway, he was not his usual ebullient self and he soon left us on the prow and went to supervise the repairs to the hull of the Breath ofHorus.

The bull's charge had sprung the underwater planking and we were taking enough water to necessitate constant bailing of the bilges with leather buckets. This was a most inefficient procedure which diverted men from their duties as rowers and warriors. Surely it could be improved upon, I thought to myself.

So while we waited for the carcasses of the dead beasts to rise, I sent one of theslave girls to fetch the basket that contained my writing instruments. Then, after a little further thought, I began to sketch out an idea for mechanically removing the water from the bilges of a fighting galley in action, a method which did not demand the efforts of half the crew. It was based pn the same principle as the shadoof water buckets. I thought that two men might operate it instead of a dozen at the buckets, as was now the case.

When I had completed the sketch, I pondered on the collision that had caused the original damage. Historically, the tactics used in battles between squadrons of river galleys had always been the same as those of land engagements. The ships would lie alongside each other and exchange volleys of arrows. They would then close and grapple and board, and finish the business with the sword. The galley captains were always careful to avoid collision, as this was considered sloppy seamanship.

'But what if?' I thought suddenly, and I began a sketch of a galley with a reinforced bow. As the idea took firm root I added a horn like that of the rhinoceros at the water line. It could be carved from hardwood and clad with bronze. Angled forwards and slightly downwards, it could be driven through the hull of an opposing vessel to rip out her belly. I was so engrossed that I did not hear Tanus come up behind me. He snatched the papyrus scroll from me and studied it avidly.

Of course, he understood instantly what I was about. When his father had lost his fortune, I had tried everything in my power to find a rich patron to sponsor him to enter one of the temples as a novice scribe, there to continue his studies and his learning. For I truly believed that, with my tutelage, he had every prospect of developing into one of the great minds of Egypt, perhaps in time a name to rank with that of Imhotep who, one thousand years before, had designed those first marvellous pyramids at Saqqarah.

I had been unsuccessful, naturally enough, for the same enemy whose spite and guile had destroyed Tanus' father had set out to bar the way to Tanus himself. No man in the land could prevail against such a baleful influence. So instead I had helped Tanus to enter the army. Despite my disappointment and misgivings, this had been his own choice of career ever since he had first stood upright and wielded a wooden sword on the other infants in the playground.

'By the carbuncles on Seth's buttocks!' he exclaimed now, as he studied my drawings. 'You and that designing brush of yours are worth ten full squadrons to me!'

Tanus' casual blasphemy on the name of the great god Seth always alarms me. For although both he and I are Horus men, still I do not believe in flagrantly offering offence to any member of the pantheon of Egyptian gods. I personally never pass a shrine without offering a prayer or making a small sacrifice, no matter how humble or unimportant the god it houses. It is, to my mind, simple common sense and good insurance. One has sufficient enemies amongst men without deliberately seeking out others amongst the gods. I am particularly obsequious to Seth, for his formidable reputation terrifies me. I suspect that Tanus knows all this and deliberately does it to tease me. However, my discomfort was soon forgotten in the warm glow of his praise.

'How do you do it?' he demanded. 'I am the soldier, and today I saw everything that you did. Why did not the same ideas occur to me?'

We were instantly immersed in a lively discussion of my designs. Of course, Lostris could not be excluded for long, and she came to join us. Her handmaidens had dried and rebraided her hair and retouched her make-up. Her loveliness was a distraction, especially since she stood beside me and nonchalantly draped one slim arm over my shoulder. She would never have touched a man like that in public, for it would have offended against custom and modesty. But then I am not a man, and though she leaned against me, her eyes never left Tanus' face.

Her preoccupation with him went back to when she had first learned to walk. She had stumbled along adoringly behind the lordly ten-year-old Tanus, faithfully trying to copy his every gesture and word. When he spat, she spat. When he swore, she lisped the same oath, until Tanus had complained bitterly to me, 'Can you not make her leave me alone, Taita? She's just a baby!' He was not doing much complaining now, I noticed.

At last we were interrupted by a hail from the lookout in the bows, and we all hurried forward and peered eagerly across the lagoon. The first hippopotamus carcass was rising to the surface. It came up belly first as the gases in its intestines expanded and the guts distended like a child's balloon made from a goat's bladder. It bobbed on the surface with all its legs extended stiffly. One of the galleys sped across to recover it. A saitor scrambled out on to the carcass and secured a line to one of the legs. As soon as this was done, the galley towed it away towards the distant shore. . By now the huge corpses were surfacing all around us. The galleys gathered them up and dragged them away. Tanus secured two of them to our stern-hawser and the rowers strained at their paddles to move them through the water.

As we approached the shore I shaded my eyes against the slanting sun's rays and peered ahead. It seemed that every man, woman and child in Upper Egypt was waiting upon the bank. They were a vast multitude, dancing and singing and waving palm-fronds to welcome the incoming fleet. The restless movement of their white robes seemed like a storm surf breaking upon the edge of the placid lagoon.

As each galley drew up against the bank, teams of men clad only in the briefest loin-cloths waded out as deep as their armpits to fasten ropes to the bloated carcasses, hi their excitement they were oblivious to the ever-present threat of crocodiles lurking in the opaque green waters. Every season these ferocious dragons devour hundreds of our people.

Sometimes they are so bold that they rush out on to dry land to seize a child playing near the water's edge or a peasant woman washing clothes or drawing water for her family.

Now, in the vast meat-hunger that gripped them, the people were interested in only one thing. They seized the ropes and hauled the carcasses ashore. As they slithered up the muddy bank, scores of tiny silver fish that had been feasting on the open wounds were slow to relinquish their hold and were drawn out with the carcasses. Stranded upon the mud-banks, they flopped and quivered like stars that had fallen to earth.

Men and women, all wielding knives or axes, swarmed like ants over the bodies. In a delirium of greed they howled and snarled at each other like vultures and hyenas on a lion's kill, disputing each titbit as they hacked at the gigantic carcasses. Blood and bone chips flew in sheets as the blades hacked and hewed. There would be long lines of wounded at the temple that evening, awaiting treatment from the priests for their missing fingers and gashes down to the bone where the careless blades had slipped.

I too would be busy half the night, for in some quarters I have a reputation as a medical doctor that surpasses even that of the priests of Osiris. In all modesty I must admit that this reputation is not entirely unwarranted, and Horus knows my fees are much more reasonable than those of the holy men. My Lord Intef allows me to keep for myself a third part of all that I earn. Thus I am a man of some substance, despite my slave status.

From the stern-tower of the Breath of Horus I watched the pantomime of human frailty that was being played out below me. Traditionally the populace is allowed to eat its fill of the meats of the hunt upon the foreshore, just as long as none of the spoils are carried away. Living as we do in a verdant land which is fertilized and watered by the great river, our people are well fed. However, the staple diet of the poorer classes is grain, and months may pass between their last mouthful of meat and the next. Added to which, the festival was a time when all the normal restraints of everyday life were thrust aside. There was licence to excess in all things of the body, in food and drink and carnal passion. There would be sore bellies and aching heads and matrimonial recriminations on the morrow, but this was the first day of the festival and there was no check on any appetite.

I smiled as I watched a mother, naked to the waist and plastered from head to toe with blood and fat, emerge from the belly cavity of a hippopotamus, clutching a running lump of liver which she threw to one of her brood in the jostling, shrieking pack of children that surrounded the carcass. The woman ducked back into the interior of the beast, while, clutching his prize, the child darted away to one of the hundreds of cooking-fires that burned along the shore. There an elder brother snatched the hunk of liver from him and threw it on the coals, while a pack of younger urchins crowded forward impatiently, slavering like puppies.

The eldest child hooked the barely scorched liver off the fire with a green twig, and his brothers and sisters fell upon it and devoured it. Immediately it was consumed they bayed for more, with fat and juice running down their faces and dripping from their chins. Many of the younger ones had probably never tasted the delicious flesh of the river-cow before. It is sweet and tender and fine-grained, but most of all it is fat, fatter than beef or striped wild ass, and the marrow-bones are truly a delicacy fit for the great god Osiris himself. Our people are starved of animal fat and the taste of it drove them wild. They gorged themselves, as was their right on this day.

I was content to keep aloof from this riotous mob, happy in the knowledge that my Lord Intef s bailiffs would secure the finest cuts and marrow-bones for the palace kitchens where the cooks would prepare my personal platter to perfection. My precedence in the vizier's household exceeds all other, even that of his major-domo or the commander of his bodyguard, both of whom are free-born. Of course, it is never openly spoken of, but all tacitly acknowledge my privileged and superior position and few would dare challenge it.

I watched the bailiffs at work now, claiming the share of my lord, the governor and grand vizier of all the twenty-two nomes of Upper Egypt. They swung their long staves with the expertise bom of long practice, whacking any bare back or set of naked buttocks that presented themselves as targets, and shouting their demands.

The ivory teeth of the animals belonged to the vizier, and the bailiffs collected every one of them. They were as valuable as the elephant tusks that are brought down in trade from the land of Cush, beyond the cataracts. The last elephant had been killed in our Egypt almost one thousand years ago, in the reign of one of the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, or so the hieroglyphics on the stele in his temple boast. Naturally, from the fruits of the hunt my lord was expected to tithe the priests of Hapi who were the titular shepherds of the goddess's flock of river-cows. However, the amount of the tithe was in my lord's discretion, and I who was in overall charge of the palace accounts knew where the lion's share of the treasure would end up. My Lord Intef does not indulge in unnecessary generosity, even towards a goddess.

As for the hides of the hippopotamus, these belonged to the army and would be turned into war shields for the officers of the guards regiments. The army quartermasters were supervising the skinning-out and the handling of the hides, each of which was almost the size of a Bedouin tent.

The meat that could, not be consumed on the bank would be pickled in brine, or smoked or dried. Ostensibly it would be used to feed the army, the members of the law courts, the temples and other civil servants of the state. However, in practice a large part of it would be discreetly sold, and the proceeds would filter down quite naturally into my lord's coffers. As I have said before, my lord was the wealthiest man in the Upper Kingdom after Pharaoh himself, and growing richer every year.

A fresh commotion broke out behind me, and I turned quickly. Tanus' squadron was still in action. The galleys were drawn up in line of battle, stem to stern, parallel to the shore-line, but fifty paces off it on the edge of the deeper water. On each ship harpooneers stood at the rails with their weapons poised and pointed down at the surface of the lagoon.

The taint of blood and offal in the water had attracted the crocodiles. Not only from all over the lagoon, but from as far off as the main course of the Nile, they had come swarming to the feast. The harpooneers were waiting for them. Each long harpoon pole was tipped with a relatively small bronze head, viciously barbed. Spliced to an eye in the metal head was a tough flax rope.

The skill of the harpooneers was truly impressive. As one of these scaly saurians came slipping through the green water, with its great crested tail flailing, moving like a long dark shadow, silent and deadly beneath the surface, they would be waiting for it. They would allow the crocodile to pass beneath the galley, and then, as it emerged on the far side with the harpooneer's movements screened from it by the ship's hull, he would lean out over it and stab downwards.

It was not a violent blow, but an almost delicate dab with the long pole. The bronze head was as sharp as a surgeon's needle, and its full length was buried deep beneath the reptile's thick, scaly hide. The harpooneer aimed for the back of the neck, and so skilful were these thrusts that many of them pierced the spinal cord and killed the creature instantly.

However, when a blow missed its mark, the water exploded as the wounded crocodile burst into wild convulsions. With a twist of the harpoon pole the metal head was detached and remained buried in the reptile's armoured neck. Then four men took the creature on the flax line to control its contortions. If the crocodile was a large one? and some of them were four times the length of a man stretched out on the ground?then the coils of line were whipped away smoking over the gunwale, scorching the palms of the men who were trying to hold it.

When this happened, even the hungry crowds on the beach paused for a while to cheer and shout encouragement, and to watch the struggle as the crocodile was eventually subdued or the rope parted like a whiplash and the sailors were sent tumbling backwards across the deck. More often, the stout flax line held. As soon as the crew were able to turn the reptile's head towards them, it could no longer swim out into the deep water. They could then drag it in a turmoil of froth and white water to the ship's side where another gang was waiting with clubs to crush the rock-hard skull.

When the carcasses of the crocodiles were dragged to the bank, I went ashore to examine them. The skinners of Tanus' regiment were already at work.

It was the grandfather of our present king who had granted the regiment the honorific 'the Blue Crocodile Guards' and bestowed upon them the standard of the Blue Crocodile. Their battle armour is made from the horny skins of these dragons. Properly treated and cured, it becomes hard enough to stop an arrow or turn the edge of an enemy sword-cut. It is far lighter in weight than metal, and much cooler to wear in the desert sun. Tanus, in his crocodile-skin helmet all decorated with ostrich plumes, and his breastplate of the same hide, polished and starred with bronze rosettes, is a sight to strike terror into the heart of an enemy, or turmoil into the belly of any maiden who looks upon him.

As I measured and noted the length and girth of each carcass, and watched the skinners at work, I felt not even the most fleeting sympathy for these hideous monsters as I had for the slaughtered river-cows. To my mind there is no more loathsome beast in nature than the crocodile, with the possible exception of the venomous asp.

My revulsion was increased a hundredfold when a skinner slit open the belly of one of the largest of these grotesque animals, and out on to the mud slithered the partly digested remains of a young girl. The crocodile had swallowed the entire top half of her body, from the waist upwards. Although the flesh was bleached soft and pasty-white by the digestive juices and was sloughing from the skull, the girl's top-knot was still intact and neatly plaited and coiled above the ghastly, ruined face. As a further macabre touch, there was a necklace around her throat and pretty bracelets of red and blue ceramic beads on the skeletal wrists.

No sooner was this gruesome relic revealed than there came a shriek so high and heart-rending that it cut through the hubbub of the throng, and a woman elbowed aside the soldiers and ran forward to drop on her knees beside the pitiful remains. She tore her clothing and keened the dreadful ululation of mourning.

'My daughter! My little girl!' She was the same woman who had come to the palace the previous day to report her daughter missing. The officials had told her that the child had probably been abducted and sold into slavery by one of the gangs of bandits who were terrorizing the countryside. These gangs had become a force in the land, blatantly conducting their lawless depredations in broad daylight right up to die gates of the cities. The palace officials had warned the woman that there was nothing they could do about recovering her daughter, for the gangs were beyond any control that the state could exert upon them.

For once mis dire prediction had proved unfounded. The mother had recognized the ornaments which still decorated the pathetic little corpse. My heart went out to the stricken woman, as I sent a slave to fetch an empty wine jar. Although the woman and her child were both strangers to me, I could not prevent my own tears from welling up as I helped her to gather the remains and place them in the jar for decent burial.

As she staggered away into the uncaring multitude of revellers, carrying the jar clutched to her breast, I reflected mat despite all the rites and prayers mat the mother would lavish upon her daughter, and even in the unlikely event that she could afford the staggering cost of the most rudimentary mummification, the child's shade could never find immortality in the life beyond the grave. For that to happen, the corpse must be intact and whole before embalming. My feelings were all for the unfortunate mother. It is a weakness of mine that I so often lament, that I take upon myself the cares and sorrows of every unfortunate that crosses my path. It would be easier to have a harder heart, and a more cynical turn of mind.

As always when I am saddened or distressed, I reached for my brush and scroll and began to record all that was taking place around me, everything from the harpooneers, the bereaved mother, the skinning and the butchery of the dead river-cows and crocodiles on the beach, to the unfettered behaviour of the feasting, revelling populace.

Already those who were stuffed with meat and gorged with beer were snoring where they had fallen, oblivious of being kicked and trampled by the others still capable of remaining upright. The younger and more shameless were dancing and embracing and using the gathering darkness and the inadequate cover of the scanty bushes and the trampled papyrus beds to screen their blatant copulations. This wanton behaviour was merely a symptom of the malaise that afflicted the entire land. It would not have been thus if only there had been a strong pharaoh, and a moral and upright administration in the nome of Greater Thebes. The common people take their example from those above them.

Although I disapproved most strongly of it all, still I recorded it faithfully. Thus an hour sped away while I sat cross-legged and totally absorbed upon the poop-deck of the Breath ofHorus, scribbling and sketching. The sun sank and seemed to quench itself in the great river, leaving a coppery sheen on the water and a smoky glow in the western sky as though it had set fire to the papyrus beds.

The crowds on the beach were becoming ever more raucous and unrestrained. The harlots were doing a brisk trade. I watched a plump and matronly love-priestess, wearing the distinctive blue amulet of her calling upon her forehead, lead a skinny sailor who was half her size from one of the galleys into the shadows beyond the firelight. There she dropped her skirts and fell to her knees in the dust, presenting him with a quivering parr of monumental buttocks. With a happy cry the little fellow was upon her like a dog on a bitch, and within seconds she was yapping as loudly as he was. I began to sketch their antics, but the light faded swiftly, and I was forced to quit for the day.

As I set my scroll aside, I realized with a start that I had not seen my mistress since before the incident with the dead child. I leaped to my feet hi a panic. How could I have been so remiss? My mistress had been strictly raised, I had seen to that. She was a good and moral child, fully aware of the duties and obligations which law and custom placed upon her. She was aware also of the honour of the high family to which she belonged, and of her place in society. What was more, she stood in as much awe as I did of her father's authority and temper. Of course I trusted her.

I trusted her as much as I would have trusted any other strong-willed young creature in the first flush of passionate womanhood on a night such as this, alone somewhere in the darkness with the handsome and equally passionate young soldier with whom she was totally infatuated.

My panic was not so much for the fragile maidenhead of my mistress, that ethereal talisman which once lost is seldom mourned, as for the much more substantial risk of damage to my own skin. On the morrow we would return to Karnak and the palace of my Lord Intef, where there would be wagging tongues aplenty to carry the tale of any lapse or indiscretion on any of our parts to him.

My lord's spies permeated every layer of society and every corner of our land, from the docks and the fields to the palace of Pharaoh itself. They were even more numerous than my own, for he had more money to pay his agents, although many of them served both of us impartially and our networks interlocked at many levels. If Lostris had disgraced us all, father, family, and me her tutor and guardian, then my Lord Intef would know of it by morning, and so would I.

I ran from one end of the ship to the other, searching for her. I climbed into the stern-tower and scanned the beach in desperation. I could see nothing of her or of Tanus, and my worst fears were encouraged.

Where to search for them in this mad night I could not begin to think. I caught myself wringing my hands in an agony of frustration, and stopped myself immediately. I am always at pains to avoid any appearance of effeminacy. I do so abhor those obese, mincing, posturing creatures who have suffered the same mutilation as I have. I always try to conduct myself like a man rather than a eunuch.

I controlled myself with an effort and assumed the same coldly determined mien that I had seen on Tanus' features in the heat of battle, whereupon my wits were restored to me and I became rational once again. I considered how my mistress was likely to behave. Of course, I knew her intimately. After all, I had studied her for fourteen years. I realized that she was much too fastidious and conscious of her noble rank brazenly to mingle with the drunken, uncouth throng upon the beach, or to creep away into the bushes to play the beast with two backs, as I had watched the sailor and the fat old harlot do. I knew that I could call upon no one else to assist me in my search, for that would have guaranteed that my Lord Intef would hear all about it. I had to do it all myself.

To what secret place had Lostris allowed herself to be carried away? Like most young girls of her age she was enchanted with the idea of romantic love. I doubted that she had ever seriously considered the more earthy aspects of the physical act, despite the best efforts of those two little black sluts of hers to enlighten her. She had not even displayed any great deal of interest in the mechanics of the business when I had attempted, as was my duty, to warn her, at least sufficiently to protect her from herself.

I realized then that I must look for her in some place that would live up to her sentimental expectations of love. If there had been a cabin on the Breath ofHorus I would have hurried to it, but our river galleys are small, utilitarian righting ships, stripped down for speed and manoeuvrability. The crew sleep on the bare deck, while even the captain and his officers have only a reed awning for a night shelter. This was not rigged at the moment, and so there was no place aboard where they could be hiding.

Karnak and the palace were half a day's travel away. The slaves were only now erecting our tents on one of the small inshore islands that had been set aside to give our party privacy from the common herd of humanity. It was remiss of the slaves to be so tardy, but they had been caught up in the festivities. In the torchlight I could see that a few of them were more than a little unsteady on their feet as they struggled with the guy-ropes. They had not yet erected Lostris' personal tent, so the luxurious comforts of carpets and embroidered hangings and down-filled mattresses and linen sheets were not available to the lovers. So where then might they be?

At that moment a soft yellow glow of torchlight farther out on the lagoon caught my attention. Immediately my intuition was aroused. I realized that, given my mistress's connections with the goddess Hapi, her temple on its picturesque little granite island in the middle of the lagoon would be exactly the place that would draw Lostris irresistibly. I searched the beach for some means of reaching the island. Although there were shoals of small craft drawn up on the shore, the ferrymen were mostly falling-down drunk.

Then I spotted Kratas on the beach. The ostrich feathers on his helmet stood high above the heads of the crowd, and his proud bearing marked him out.

'Kratas!' I yelled at him, and he looked across at me and waved. Kratas was Tanus' chief lieutenant and, apart from myself, the firmest of his multitude of friends. I could trust Kratas as I dared trust no other.

'Get me a boat!' I screamed at him. 'Any boat!' I was so distraught and my tone so shrill that it carried clearly to him. It was typical of the man that he wasted not a moment in question or indecision. He strode to the nearest felucca on the shore. The ferryman was lying like a log in his own bilges. Kratas took him by the scruff of the neck and lifted him out bodily. He dropped him on the beach, and the ferryman never moved, but lay in a stupor of cheap wine, twisted in the attitude that Kratas had dumped him in. Kratas launched the craft himself and, with a few thrusts of the punt pole, laid alongside the Breath of Horus. In my haste I tumbled from the tower and landed in a heap in the bows of the tiny craft.

'To the temple, Kratas,' I pleaded with him as I scrambled up, 'and may the sweet goddess Hapi grant we are not already too late!'

With the evening breeze in the lateen sail we were whisked across the dark waters to the stone jetty below the temple. Kratas secured the painter to one of the mooring-rings, and made as if to follow me ashore, but I stopped him.

'For Tanus' sake, not mine,' I told him, 'do not follow me, please.'

He hesitated a moment, then nodded. 'I will be listening for your call.' He drew his sword and offered it to me, hilt first. 'Will you need this?'

I shook my head. 'It is not that kind of danger. Besides, I have my dagger. But thank you for your trust.' I left him in the boat and hurried up the granite steps to the entrance of the temple of Hapi.

The rush torches in their brackets on the tall entrance pillars threw a ruddy, wavering light that seemed to bring to life the bas-relief carvings on the walls and make them dance. The goddess Hapi is one of my favourites. Strictly speaking, she is neither god nor goddess, but a strange, bearded, hermaphroditic creature possessed of both a massive penis and an equally cavernous vagina, and bounteous breasts that give milk to all. She is the deification of the Nile, and the goddess of the harvest. The two kingdoms of Egypt and all the peoples in them depend utterly upon her and the periodic flooding of the great river which is her alter ego. She is able to change her gender or, like many of the other gods of this very Egypt, take on the shape of any animal at will. Her favourite guise is that of the hippopotamus. Despite the god's ambiguous sexuality, my mistress Lostris always considered her to be female, and so do I. The priests of Hapi may differ from us on this view.

Her images upon the stone walls were vast and motherly. Painted in hectic primary colours of red and yellow and blue, she beamed down with the head of a kindly river-cow, and seemed to invite all of nature to be fruitful and to multiply. The implied invitation was most inappropriate to my present anxiety. It was my fear that my precious charge might even at this moment be availing herself of the goddess's indulgence.

A priestess was kneeling at the side-altar, and I ran to her, seized her by the hem of her cape and tugged at it urgently. 'Holy sister, tell me, have you seen the Lady Lostris, daughter of the grand vizier?' There were very few citizens of Upper Egypt who did not know my mistress by sight. They all loved her for her beauty, her gay spirit and her sweet disposition, and they clustered around her and cheered her in the streets and market-places when she walked abroad.

The priestess grinned at me, all wrinkled and toothless, and she laid one bony finger on the side of her nose with such a sly and knowing expression that all my worst fears were confirmed.

I shook her again, but less gently. 'Where is she, revered old mother? I beseech you, speak!' But instead she wagged her head and rolled her eyes towards the portals of the inner sanctum.

I sped across the granite flags, my heart outrunning my frantic feet, but even in my distress I wondered at the boldness of my mistress. Although as a member of the high nobility she had right of access to the holy of holies, was there another in all of Egypt who would have the nerve to choose such a place for her love tryst?

At the entrance to the sanctum I paused. My instinct had been right. There they were, the two of them, just as I had dreaded. 1 was so obsessed by my own certainty of what was taking place that I almost yelled aloud to them to stop it. Then I checked myself.

My mistress was fully clad, more so than was usual, for her breasts were covered and she had spread a blue woollen shawl over her head. She was kneeling before the gigantic statue of Hapi. The goddess beamed down upon her, bedecked in wreaths of blue water-lilies.

Tanus knelt beside her. He had laid aside his weapons and his armour. They were piled at the door of the sanctuary. He was dressed only in a linen shift and short tunic, with sandals on his feet. The young couple were holding hands, and their faces were almost touching as they whispered solemnly together.

My base suspicions were refuted, and I was struck with remorse and shame. How could I ever have doubted my mistress? Quietly I began to withdraw, although I would go only as far as the side-altar, where I would give thanks to the goddess for her protection, and from where I could keep a discreet eye on further proceedings.

However, at that moment Lostris rose to her feet and diffidently approached the statue of the goddess. I was so enthralled by her girlish grace mat I lingered a moment longer to watch her.

From around her neck she unclasped the lapis lazuli figurine of the goddess which I had made for her. I realized with a pang that she was about to offer it as a sacrifice. That jewel had been crafted with all my love for her, and I hated to see it leave her throat. Lostris stood on tiptoe to hang it on the idol's neck. Then she knelt and kissed the stone foot while Tanus watched, still kneeling where she had left him.

She rose and turned to go back to him, but then she saw me in the doorway. I tried to melt away into the shadows, for I was embarrassed at having spied upon so intimate a moment. However, her face lit with joy and before I could escape, she ran to me and seized my hands.

'Oh, Taita, I am so glad that you are here?you of all people! It is so fitting. It makes it all so perfect.' She led me forward into the sanctum and Tanus rose to his feet and came smiling to take my other hand.

'Thank you for coming. I know we can always count upon you.' I wished that my motives had been as pure as they believed them to be, so I hid my guilty heart from them with a loving smile.

'Kneel here!' Lostris ordered me. 'Here, where you can hear every word we say to each other. You will bear witness for us before Hapi and all the gods of Egypt.' She pressed me to my knees, and then she and Tanus resumed their places in front of the goddess and took each other's hands, looking full into each other's eyes.

Lostris spoke first. 'You are my sun,' she whispered. 'My day is dark without you.'

'You are the Nile of my heart,' Tanus told her quietly. "The waters of your love feed my soul.'

'You are my man, through this world and all the worlds to come.'

'You are my woman, and I pledge you my love. I swear it to you on the breath and the blood of Horus,' Tanus said clearly and openly, so that his voice echoed through the stone halls.

'I take up your pledge and return it to you one hundredfold,' Lostris cried. 'No one can ever come between us. Nothing can ever part us. We are one, for ever.'

She offered her face to his and he kissed her, deeply and lingeringly. As far as I was aware, it was the first kiss that the couple had ever exchanged. I felt that I was privileged to have witnessed such an intimate moment.

As they embraced, a sudden chill wind off the lagoon swirled through the dimly lit halls of the temple and fluttered the torch flames, so that for an instant the faces of the two lovers blurred before my eyes and the image of the goddess seemed to stir and quiver. The wind passed as swiftly as it had come, but the whisper of it around the great stone pillars was like the distant sardonic laughter of the gods, and I shuddered with superstitious awe.

It is always dangerous to pique the gods with extravagant demands, and Lostris had just asked for the impossible. This was the moment that for years I had known was coming, and which I had dreaded more bitterly than the day of my own death. The pledge that Tanus and Lostris had made to each other could never endure. No matter how deeply they meant it, it could never be. I felt my own heart tearing within me as, at last, they broke the kiss and both turned back to me.

'Why so sad, Taita?' Lostris demanded, her own face flooded with joy. 'Rejoice with me, for this is the happiest day of my life.'

I forced my lips to smile, but I could find no word of comfort or of felicitation for these two, the ones I loved best in all the world. I remained upon my knees, with that fixed, idiotic smile on my lips and desolation in my soul.

Now Tanus lifted me to my feet and embraced me. 'You will speak to Lord Intef on my behalf, won't you?' he demanded as he hugged me.

'Oh yes, Taita,' Lostris joined her plea to his. 'My father will listen to you. You are the only one who can do it for us. You won't fail us, will you, Taita? You have never let me down, never once in all my life. You'll do it for me, won't you?'

What could I say to them? I could not be so cruel as to tell them the blunt truth. I could not find the words to blight this fresh and tender love. They were waiting for me to speak, to express-my joy for them, and to promise them my help and support. But I was struck dumb, my mouth was as dry as if I had bitten into, an unripe pomegranate.

'Taita, what is it?' I watched the joy wither upon my mistress's beloved countenance. 'Why do you not rejoice for us?'

'You know that I love you both, but?' I could not continue.

'But? But what, Taita?' Lostris demanded. 'Why do you give me "buts" and a long face on this happiest of all possible days?' She was becoming angry, her jaw was setting, but at the same time there were tears gathering deep in her eyes. 'Don't you want to help us? Is this the real value of all the promises you have made to me over the years?' She came to me and thrust her face close to mine in challenge.

'Mistress, please don't talk like that. I do not deserve that treatment. No, listen to me!' I placed my fingers on her lips to forestall another outburst. 'It is not me. It is your father, my Lord Intef?'

'Exactly.' Impatiently Lostris plucked my hand away from her mouth. 'My father! You will go to him and speak to him the way you always do, and it will be all right.'

'Lostris,'"! began, and it was a sign of my distress that I used her name in this familiar fashion, 'you are no longer a child. You must not delude yourself with childish fantasies. You know that your father will never agree?'

She would not listen to me, she did not want to hear the truth that I would speak, so she rushed in with words to drown out mine. 'I know that Tanus has no fortune, yes. But he has a marvellous future ahead of him. One day he will command all the armies of Egypt. One day he will fight the battles which will reunite the two kingdoms, and I will be at his side.'

'Mistress, please hear me out. It is not only the lack of Tanus' fortune. It is more, much more.'

'His blood-line and his breeding, then? Is that what troubles you? You know full well that his family is as noble as ours. Pianki, Lord Harrab was my own father's equal and his dearest friend.' She had closed her ears to me. She did not realize the depth of the tragedy on which we were embarking. Neither she nor Tanus did, but then I was probably the only person in the kingdom who understood it fully.

I had protected her from the truth all these years and, of course, I had never been able to tell Tanus either. How could I explain it to her now? How could I reveal to her the depths of the hatred that her father bore towards the young man she loved? It was a hatred born out of guilt and envy, and yet all the more implacable for these reasons.

However, my Lord Intef was a crafty and devious man. He was able to conceal his feelings from those around him. He was able to dissemble his hatred and his spite, and to kiss the one he would destroy and heap rich gifts and lulling flattery upon him. He had the patience of the crocodile buried in the mud at the drinking-place on the river, waiting for the unsuspecting gazelle. He would wait years, even a decade, but when the opportunity arose, he was as swift as that reptile to strike and drag his prey under.

Lostris was blithely unaware of the depths of her father's rancour. She even believed that he had loved Pianki, Lord Harrab, as Tanus' father had loved him. But then how could she know the truth of it, for I had always shielded her from it? In her sweet innocence Lostris believed that the only objections that her father would have to her lover were those of fortune and family.

'You know it is true, Taita. Tanus is my equal in the lists of the nobility. It is written in the temple records for all to see. How can my father deny it? How can you deny it?'

'It is not for me to deny or to accede, mistress?'

"Then you will go to my father for us, won't you, dear Taita? Say you will, please say you will!'

I could only bow my head in acquiescence, and to hide the hopeless expression in my eyes.

THE FLEET WAS HEAVILY LADEN ON THE return to Karnak. The galleys were low in the water under their cargoes of rawhides and salted meat. Thus our progress against the Nile's current was slower than on our outward journey, but still too swift for my heavy heart and mounting dread. The lovers were gay and euphoric with then- newly declared love and their trust in me to remove the obstacles from their path. I could not bring myself to deny them this day of happiness, for I knew that it would be one of the very last they would share, I think that if I could have found the words or summoned the courage, I would have urged them, there and then, to seek the consummation of then- love that I had so opposed the night before. There would never be another chance for them, not after I had alerted my Lord Intef with my foredoomed attempt at matchmaking. Once he knew what they were about, he would come between them and thrust them apart for ever.

So instead I laughed and smiled as gaily as they did, and tried to hide my fears from them. They were so blinded by love that I succeeded, whereas at any other time my mistress would have seen through me immediately. She knows me almost as well as I know her.

We sat together in the prow, the three of us, and we discussed the re-enactment of the passion of Osiris that would be the highlight of the festival. My Lord Intef had made me the impresario of the pageant, and I had cast both Lostris and Tanus in leading roles.

The festival is held every second year, at the rising of the full moon of Osiris. There was a time when it was an annual event. However, the expense and disruption of royal life caused by having to remove the court from Elephantine to Thebes was so great that Pharaoh decreed a greater interval between the festivals. He was always a prudent man with his gold, was our Pharaoh.

The plans for the pageant provided me with a fine distraction from the looming confrontation with my Lord Intef, and so now I rehearsed the two lovers in their lines. Lostris was to play Isis, the wife of Osiris, while Tanus would take on the major role of Horus. They were both vastly amused at the idea of Tanus playing Lostris' son, and I had to explain that the gods were ageless, and it was quite possible that a goddess could appear younger than her offspring.

I had written a new script for the pageant to replace the one that had remained unchanged for almost a thousand years. The language of the ancient one was archaic and unsuitable for a modern audience. Pharaoh would be the guest of honour when the pageant was performed in the temple of Osiris on the final night of the festival, so I was particularly anxious that it should be a success. I had already encountered opposition to my new version of the passion from the more conservative nobles and priests. Only my Lord Intef's intervention had prevailed against their objections.

My lord is not a deeply religious man and would not normally have interested himself in theological arguments. However, I had included a few lines that were designed to amuse and flatter him. I read them to him out of context, and then tactfully pointed out to him that the chief opposition to my version came from the high priest of Osiris, a prissy old man who had once frustrated my Lord Intef's interest in a comely young acolyte. This was a trespass for which my lord had never forgiven the high priest.

Thus it was that my version would be performed for the first time. It was essential that the actors bring out the full glory of my poetry, or it might well be the last time it would be heard.

Both Tanus and Lostris possessed marvellous speaking voices, and they were determined to reward me for my promise to help them. They gave me of their best, and thus the rehearsal was so absorbing, their recitations so startling, that for a while I could forget myself.

Then I was brought back from the passion of the gods to my own mundane preoccupations by a cry from the lookout. The fleet was sweeping around the last bend in the river, and there lay the twin cities of Luxor and Karnak, that between them made up Greater Thebes, strung out along the bank before us and sparkling like a necklace of pearls in the stark Egyptian sunlight. Our fantastic interlude had ended, and we must face reality once again. My spirits tumbled as I scrambled to my feet.

'Tanus, you must transfer Lostris and myself to the galley of Kratas before we come any closer to the city. My lord's minions will be watching us from the land. They must not see us in your company.'

'A little late, is it not?' Tanus smiled at me. 'You should have thought of that some days ago.'

'My father will learn about us soon enough,' Lostris endorsed his objection. 'It might make your task easier if we forewarn him of our intentions.'

'If you know better than I, then you must do it your way and I will take no further part in this crazy business of yours.' I put on my most stiff and offended air, and they relented immediately.

Tanus signalled Kratas' galley alongside, and the lovers had only a few moments for their farewells. They dared not embrace before the eyes of half the fleet, but the glances and the loving words they exchanged were almost as fulfilling.

From the stern-tower of Kratas' ship we waved to the Breath of Horus as she turned from us, and with her paddles flashing like the wings of a dragonfly, she bore away to her moorings in front of the city of Luxor, while we continued on up-river towards the palace of the grand vizier.

IMMEDIATELY WE DOCKED AT THE PALACE wharf, I made enquiry as' to the whereabouts of my master and was relieved to learn that he had crossed the river to undertake a last-minute inspection of Pharaoh's tomb and funerary temple on the west bank. The king's temple and tomb had been under construction for the past twelve years, ever since the first day that he had donned the double white and red crown of the two kingdoms. It was nearing completion at last, and the king would be anxious to visit it as soon as the festival was over and he was free to do so. My Lord Intef was anxious that the king should not be disappointed. One of my lord's many titles and honours was Guardian of the Royal Tombs, and it was a serious responsibility.

His absence afforded me a further day in which to prepare my case and plan my strategy. However, the solemn promise that the two lovers had extracted from me was to speak out for them at the first opportunity, and I knew that would be on the morrow when my lord held his weekly assize.

As soon as I had seen my mistress safely ensconced in the harem, I hurried to my own quarters in that wing of the palace which is reserved for the special companions of the grand vizier.

My Lord Intef's domestic arrangements were as devious as the rest of his existence. He had eight wives, all of whom brought to his marriage-bed either substantial dowry or influential political connections. However, only three of these women had ever borne him children. Apart from my Lady Lostris, there were two sons.

As far as I was aware, and I was aware of everything that happened in the palace and most of what happened outside it, my lord had not visited the harem in the last fifteen years. The getting of Lostris had been the last occasion that he had performed his matrimonial duties. His sexual tastes lay in other directions. The special companions of the grand vizier who lived in our wing of the palace were as pretty a collection of slave boys as you could find in the Upper Kingdom, where over the previous hundred years pederasty had replaced wild-fowling and hunting as the favourite preoccupation of most of the nobility. This was merely another symptom of the ills that beset our lovely land.

I was the eldest of this select company of slave boys. Unlike so many others over the years whom, once their physical beauty had begun to fade or pall, my lord had sent to the auction block in the slave-market, I had endured. He had come to value me for virtues other than my physical beauty alone. Not that this had faded?on the contrary, it had grown more striking as I had matured. You must not think me vain if I mention this, but I have determined to set down nothing but the truth in these accounts. They are remarkable enough without my having to resort to false modesty.

No, my lord seldom pleasured himself with me in those days, a neglect for which I was truly thankful. When he did so, it was usually only to punish me. He knew full well the physical pain and the humiliation his attentions always caused me. Although I had still been a child when I first learned to hide my revulsion, and to simulate pleasure in the perverse acts that he forced upon me, I never succeeded in deceiving him.

Strangely, my feelings of disgust and my loathing for this unnatural congress never detracted from his own enjoyment, rather they seemed to enhance it. He was neither a gentle nor a compassionate man, my Lord Intef. I have counted in the hundreds the slave boys who, over the years, were brought to me weeping and torn after their first night of love with my master. I doctored them and tried my best to comfort them. That is perhaps why they called me Akh-Ker in the slave boys' quarters, a name which means Elder Brother.

I might no longer be my master's favourite plaything, but he valued me much more highly than that. I was many other things to him?physician and artist, 'musician and scribe, architect and bookkeeper, adviser and confidant, engineer and nursemaid to his daughter. I am not so naive as to believe that he loved me or that he trusted me, but I think that at times he came as close to it as he was capable. That was why Lostris had prevailed upon me to plead on her behalf.

My Lord Intef had no concern for his only daughter, other than to maintain her marriage value at its optimum, and this was another duty that he delegated entirely to me. Sometimes he did not speak a single word to her from one flooding of the Nile to the next. He showed no discernible interest in the regular reports which I made to him of her training and schooling.

Of course, I was always at pains to conceal from him my true feelings for Lostris, knowing that he would certainly use them against me at the first opportunity. I always tried to give him the impression that I found her tuition and her care a tedious duty that I mildly resented having thrust upon me, and that I shared his own disdain and distaste for all of womankind. I don't think he ever realized that, despite my emasculation, I had the feelings and desires of a natural man towards the opposite sex.

My lord's disinterest in his daughter was the reason why I was occasionally tempted, on the urging of my mistress, to run such insane risks as this latest escapade of ours on board the Breath of Horus. There was usually at least a chance that we would get away with it.

That evening I retired early to my private quarters, where my first concern was to feed and pamper my darlings. I have a love for birds and animals, and a way with them that amazes even myself. I had an intimate friendship with a dozen cats, for no one can ever claim to own a cat. I owned, on the other hand, a pack of fine dogs. Tanus and I used them to hunt the oryx and the lion out in the desert.

The wild birds flocked to my terrace to enjoy the hospitality I provided for them. They competed raucously amongst themselves for a perch on my shoulder or on my hand. The boldest of them would take food from between my lips. My tame gazelle would brush against my legs like one of the cats, and my two falcons squawk at me from their perches on the terrace. They were the rare desert Sa-kers, beautiful and fierce. Whenever we were able, Tanus and I would take them out into the desert to fly them against the giant bustards. I took great pleasure from their speed and aerial grace as they stooped down on their prey. Anyone else who attempted to fondle them would feel the cutting edge of those hooked yellow bills, but with me they were as gentle as sparrows.

Only once I had taken care of my menagerie did I call one of the slave boys to bring my evening meal. On the terrace overlooking the wide green expanse of the Nile I savoured the exquisite little dish of wild quail cooked in honey and goat's milk that the head chef had prepared especially to welcome me home. From there I was able to watch for the return of my lord's barge from the far bank. It came with the sunset glowing on the single square sail, and I felt my spirits sink. He might send for me this evening, and I was not ready to face him.

Then with relief I heard Rasfer, the commander of the palace guard, shouting for my lord's favourite of the moment, a sloe-eyed Bedouin lad, barely ten years old. A short while later I heard the child protesting in a terrified treble as Rasfer dragged him past my door towards the curtained entrance of the grand vizier's chambers. Although I had heard it so many times before, I never could harden myself to the sounds of the children, and I felt the familiar pang of pity. Still, I was relieved that it was not I who would be called that evening. I would need a good night's sleep so as to look my best in the morning.

I woke before dawn with the feeling of dread still strong upon me. Even my ritual swim in the cool waters of the Nile did nothing to relieve it. I hurried back to my chamber where two of the slave boys were waiting to oil my body and comb out my hair. I detested the new fashion amongst the nobility of wearing make-up. My own skin and complexion were fine enough not to require it, but my lord liked his boys to use it, and I wanted to please him especially that day.

Even though my image in the bronze mirror reassured me, I could find no appetite for my breakfast. I was the first member of my lord's entourage awaiting his arrival in the water-garden where he held his assize every morning.

While I waited for the rest of the court to assemble I watched the kingfishers at work. I had designed and supervised the building of the water-garden. It was a marvellous complex of channels and ponds which overflowed from one into the other. The flowering plants had been collected from every part of the kingdom and beyond, and they were a dazzle of colour. The ponds were stocked with all the hundreds of varieties of fish that the Nile yields up to the nets of the fishermen, but they had to be replenished daily as a result of the depredations of the kingfishers.

My Lord Intef enjoyed watching the birds hovering in the air like jewels of lapis lazuli, then darting down to hit the water in a flash of spray, and rising again with a silver sliver quivering in their long bills. I think he saw himself as a fellow predator, a fisher of men, and that he looked upon the birds as his kin. He never allowed the gardeners to discourage the birds.

Gradually I was joined by the rest of the court. Many of them were dishevelled and yawning from sleep. My Lord Intef keeps early hours and likes to complete the bulk of the business of state before the main heat of the day. We waited respectfully in the first rays of the sun for my lord's arrival. 'He's in a good mood this morning,' the chamberlain whispered, as he took his place beside me, and I felt a tiny prickle of hope. I might yet be able to escape the serious consequences of my foolhardy promise to Lostris.

There was a stirring and a murmuring amongst us as when the river breeze moves through the papyrus beds, and my Lord Intef came out to us.

His walk was stately and his manner was sumptuous, for he was mighty with the weight of his honours and his power. Around his neck he wore the Gold of Praise, that necklace of red gold from the mines of Lot which Pharaoh had laid upon him with his own hands. His praise-singer preceded him, a stump-legged dwarf chosen for his misshapen body and stentorian tones. It amused my lord to surround himself with curiosities, either beautiful or grotesque. Cavorting and prancing on his bowed legs, the dwarf chanted the lists of my lord's titles and honours.

'Behold the Support of Egypt! Greet the Guardian of the Waters of the Nile! Bow down before Pharaoh's Companion!' These were all titles granted by the king, and many of them imposed specific duties and obligations on him. As Guardian of the Waters, for instance, he was responsible for monitoring the levels and flows of the seasonal floods of the Nile, a duty which was naturally delegated to that faithful, indefatigable slave, Taita.

I had spent half a year with a team of engineers and mathematicians working under me, measuring and carving the rock cliffs at Assoun so that the height of the waters rising up them could be accurately gauged and the volume of the flood calculated. From these figures I was able to estimate the size of the harvest months in advance. This enabled both famine and plenty to be anticipated and planned for by the administration. Pharaoh had been delighted with my work and bestowed further honours and reward upon my Lord Intef.

'Bend the knee for the Nomarch of Kamak and the Governor of all the twenty-two nomes of Upper Egypt! Greet the Lord of the Necropolis and the Keeper of the Royal Tombs!' My lord was by these titles responsible for designing, building and maintaining the monuments to pharaohs long dead and the one still living. Once again, these duties were unloaded upon a long-suffering slave's shoulders. My lord's visit to Pharaoh's tomb the day before had been the first that he had undertaken since the previous festival of Osiris. It was I who was sent out in the dust and the heat to cajole and curse the lying builders and the conniving masons. I often regretted having let my master realize the extent of my talents.

He singled me out now without seeming to have done so. The yellow eyes, as implacable as those of a wild leopard, touched mine, and he inclined his head slightly. I stepped in behind him as he passed, and I was struck as always by his height and the width of his shoulders. He was an outrageously handsome man with long, clean limbs and a flat, hard belly. His head was leonine and his hair dense and lustrous. At this time he was forty years of age, and I had been his slave for almost twenty of those.

My Lord Intef led us to the barrazza in the centre of the garden, a thatched building without enclosing walls, open to the cool breeze off the river. He seated himself cross-legged on the paved floor at the low table on which lay the state scrolls, and I took my usual place behind him. The day's business began.

Twice during the morning my lord leaned back slightly towards me. He did not turn his head nor did he say a word, but he was asking my advice. I barely moved my lips and I kept my voice pitched so low that no one else could hear me and very few were even aware of the exchanges between us.

Once I murmured, 'He is lying,' and a second time, 'Retik is a better man for the post, and he has offered a gift of five gold rings to my lord's private treasury.' And though I did not mention it then, another ring of gold to me if the post were secured.

At noon my lord dismissed the congregation of officials and petitioners and called for his midday meal. For the first time that day we were alone together, except for Rasfer, who was both the commander of the palace guard and the official state executioner. Now he took his post at the gate to the garden, within sight of the barrazza but out of earshot.

With a gesture my lord invited me to move up to his elbow, and to taste the delicious meats and fruits that had been laid out before him. While we waited for the effects of any possible poisoning to manifest themselves upon me, we discussed the morning's business in detail.

Then he questioned me about the expedition to the lagoon of Hapi and the great hippopotamus hunt. I described it all to him and gave him the figures of the profits that he might expect from the meat and hides and teeth of the river-cows. I inflated the estimate of profits a little, and he smiled. His smile is frank and charming. Once you have seen it, it is easier to understand my Lord Intef's ability to manipulate and control men. Even I, who should have known better, was once again lulled by it.

As he bit into a succulent cold cut of river-cow fillet, I drew a breath, screwed up my courage and began my plea. 'My lord should know that I allowed your daughter to accompany me on the expedition.' I could see by his eyes that he already knew this and that he had been waiting for me to attempt to conceal it from him.

'You did not think to obtain my permission beforehand?' he asked mildly, and I avoided his eyes and concentrated on peeling a grape for him as I answered, 'She only asked as we were on the point of departure. As you know, the goddess Hapi is her patron, and she wished to worship and make sacrifice at the lagoon temple.'

'Still you did not ask me?' he repeated, and I offered him the grape. He parted his lips and allowed me to slip it into his mouth. That could only mean that he was well disposed towards me, so obviously he had not yet found out the full truth about Tanus and Lostris.

'My lord was in council with the nomarch of Assoun at the time. I would not have dared disturb you. Besides, there was no harm in it that I could fathom. It was a simple domestic decision which I thought beneath your concern.'

'You are so glib, aren't you, my darling?' he chuckled. 'And so beautiful today. I like the way you have painted your eyelids, and what is that perfume you are wearing?'

'It is distilled from the petals of the wild violet,' I replied. 'I am happy that you like it, for I have a flask of it as a small gift for you, my lord.' I produced the flask from my purse and went on my knees to offer it to him. He placed his finger under my chin and lifted my face to kiss me on the lips. Dutifully I responded to the kiss until he drew back and patted my cheek.

'Whatever it is you are up to, you are still very attractive, Taita. Even after all these years you can still make me smile. But tell me, you took good care of the Lady Lostris, did you not? You never let her out of your sight or care for a moment, did you?'

'As always, my lord,' I agreed vehemently.

'So there is nothing unusual concerning her that you wish to report to me, is there?'

I was still on my knees in front of him, and my next attempt to speak failed. My voice dried up.

'Do not squeak at me, my old darling,' he laughed. 'Speak out like a man, even though you are not.' It was a cruel little jibe, but it steeled me.

'There is indeed something I wish humbly to bring to my lord's attention,' I said, and it does indeed concern the Lady Lostris. As I have already reported, your daughter's red moon rose for the first time at the flooding of the great river. Since then the courses of her moon have flowed strongly each month.'

My lord made a small grimace of distaste, the functions of the feminine body repelled him. I found this ironic, considering his own preoccupation with those far less savoury reaches of the masculine anatomy.

I hurried on. 'The Lady Lostris is now of marriageable age. She is a woman of an ardent and loving nature. I believe it would be wise to find a husband for her, as soon as we can.'

'No doubt you have one to suggest?' he asked drily, and I nodded. 'There is indeed a suitor, my lord.'

'Not one, Taita. You mean another one, don't you? I know of at least six, including the nomarch of Assoun and the governor of Lot, who have already made offers.'

'I did mean another one, but this time one that the Lady Lostris approves of. As you recall, she referred to the nomarch as that fat toad, and to the governor as a randy old goat.'

"The child's approval or disapproval is of no interest to me whatsoever.' He shook his head, and smiled and stroked my cheek to encourage me. 'But go on, Taita, tell me the name of this lovelorn swain who will do me the honour of becoming my son-in-law in return for the richest dowry in Egypt.' I steeled myself to reply, but he stopped me. 'No, wait! Let me guess.'

His smile turned into that sly and foxy grin tha,t I knew so well, and I realized that he had been toying with me.

'For Lostris to welcome him, he must be young and handsome.' He pretended to muse on it. 'And for you to speak out for him, he must be a friend or a protege of yours. There must have been an opportunity for this paragon to declare his suit and to solicit your support. What would be the time and the place for that to have happened? I wonder. Could it have been at midnight in the temple of Hapi, perhaps? Am I on the right trail, Taita?'

I felt myself pale. How did he know so much? He slid his hand around behind my head and caressed the nape of my neck. This was often his prelude to love-making, and he kissed me again.

'I can see by your face that my guesses are close to the target.' He took a handful of my hair and twisted it lightly. 'Now it remains only to divine the name of this bold lover. Could it be Dakka? No, no, Dakka is not so stupid as to incur my wrath.' He twisted my hair just hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. 'Kratas, then? He is handsome and foolhardy enough to take the risk.' He twisted harder and I felt a clump of my hair come away in his hand with a tearing sound. I choked back the whimper in my throat.

'Answer me, my darling, was it Kratas?' He forced my face down into his lap.

'No, my lord,' I whispered painfully. I was not surprised to find that he was fully aroused. He pushed my face down upon himself and held me there.

'Not Kratas, are you sure?' He pretended to be puzzled. 'If it was not Kratas, then I am at a loss to guess who else might be so insolent, so insulting and so mortally stupid as to approach the virgin daughter of the grand vizier of Upper Egypt.'

Abruptly, he raised his voice. 'Rasfer!' he cried. My head was twisted in his lap so that through streaming eyes I could watch Rasfer approach.

In Pharaoh's menagerie on Elephantine Island at Assoun there was a huge black bear brought in many years ago by one of the trade caravans from the East. That vicious, scarred brute always reminded me strongly of the commander of my lord's bodyguard. They both had the same vast, shapeless body and the raw, savage power to crush a man to death. However, in loveliness of face and sweetness of disposition, the bear had been favoured far beyond Rasfer.

I watched Rasfer approach now at a trot that was surprisingly swift and agile for those heavy, tree-like legs and the swell of his hairy gut, and I was transported back over the years to the day that my manhood had been plucked from me.

It all seemed so familiar, as though I was being forced to live once more through that terrible day. Every detail of it was still so clear in my mind that I wanted to shriek aloud. The actors in that long-ago tragedy were the same. My Lord Intef, Rasfer the brute, and me. Only the girl was missing.

Her name had been Alyda. She had been the same age as me, sixteen sweet innocent years. Like me, she had been a slave. I remember her now as having been beautiful, but it is likely that my memory cheats me, for had she been so she would have gone into a harem of one of the great houses and not been relegated to the kitchen. I do know for certain that she had skin the colour and lustre of polished amber that was warm and soft to the touch. I will never forget the feel of Alyda's body, for I will never experience anything like it again. In our misery we had found comfort and deep solace in each other. I never discovered who it was that betrayed us. I am not usually a vengeful man, but I still dream that one day I will find the person who delivered us up.

At that time I had been my Lord Intef s favourite, his special darling. When he discovered that I had been faithless to him, the affront to his self-esteem was such as to drive him to the very frontier of madness.

Rasfer had come to fetch us. He dragged us to my lord's chamber, one of us in each hand, as easily as if we had been a pair of kittens. There he had stripped us naked while my Lord Intef sat cross-legged on the floor, just as he was doing now. Rasfer bound Alyda's wrists and ankles with rawhide thongs. She was pale and shivering but she did not weep. My love for her and my admiration for her courage had never been stronger than at that moment.

My Lord Intef beckoned me to kneel in front of him and he took a lock of my hair and whispered endearments to me. 'Do you love me, Taita?' he asked, and because I was afraid, and because in some dim way I thought that it might spare Alyda's suffering, I answered, 'Yes, my lord, I love you.'

'Do you love anyone else, Taita?' he asked in a voice of silk and, coward and traitor that I was, I answered him, 'No, my lord, I love only you.' It was only then that I heard Alyda begin to weep. It was one of the most harrowing sounds of my life.

He called to Rasfer, 'Bring the slut here. Place her so that they can see each other clearly. Taita must be able to see everything that is done to her.'

As Rasfer pushed the girl into my line of vision I could see that he was grinning. Then my master raised his voice slightly: 'Very well, Rasfer, you may proceed.'

Rasfer slipped a loop of braided rawhide rope over Alyda's forehead. At close intervals the rope was knotted, so that it looked like a headband such as the Bedouin women wear. Standing behind the girl, Rasfer thrust a short, stout baton of olive wood through the rawhide loop and twisted it until it came up tight against her smooth, unblemished skin. The knots of harsh leather bit into her flesh and Alyda grimaced with the pain.

'Slowly, Rasfer,' my lord warned him. 'We still have a long way to go.'

The olive-wood baton seemed like a child's toy in Ras-fer's huge, hairy paws. He twisted it with careful deliberation, a quarter of a turn at a time. The knots bit in deeper, and Alyda's mouth dropped open and her lungs emptied in a gasping rush of air. All the colour drained from her skin so that it turned to the colour of dead ashes. She struggled to fill her empty lungs with air and then released it in one long, penetrating scream.

Still grinning, Rasfer twisted the baton and the line of leather knots buried themselves in Alyda's forehead. Her skull changed shape. At first I thought it was a trick of my overwrought mind, then I realized that her head was, in truth, constricting and elongating as the loop tightened. Her scream was now a single unbroken peal that plunged into my heart like a sword-blade. It went on and on- for what seemed like for ever.

Then her skull burst. I heard the bone collapse with a sound like a palm-nut crushed in the jaws of a feeding elephant. That terrible, piercing scream was cut off abruptly, as Alyda's corpse sagged in Rasfer's hands, and my soul was filled to overflowing with my sorrow and despair.

After what seemed like an eternity my lord lifted my head and looked into my yes. His expression was sad and regretful as he told me, 'She has gone, Taita. She was evil and she led you astray. We must make certain that it never happens again. We must protect you from any further temptations.'

Once again he signalled to Rasfer and he took Alyda's naked body by the heels and dragged it out on to the terrace. The back of her crushed head bumped down the steps and her hair streamed out behind her. With a heave of his massive shoulders, Rasfer threw her far out into the river. Her slack limbs flashed and tumbled as she fell and struck the water. She sank swiftly with her hair spreading out around her like trailing fronds of the river-weed.

Rasfer turned away and went to the end of the terrace where two of his men were tending a brazier of burning charcoal. Beside the brazier a full set of surgeon's instruments were laid out on a wooden tray. He glanced over them and then nodded with satisfaction. He returned and bowed before my Lord Intef. 'All is in readiness.'

My master wiped my tear-streaked face with one finger, then lifted the finger to his lips as though he were tasting my sorrow. 'Come, my pretty darling,' he whispered, and lifting me to my feet he led me out on to the terrace. I was so distraught and blinded by my tears that I did not realize my own peril until the soldiers seized me. They threw me down and held me spread-eagled on the terracotta tiles, pinning me at wrists and ankles so that I could move only my head.

My master knelt at my head, while Rasfer knelt between my spread thighs.

'You will never do this evil thing again, Taita.' Only then did I become aware of the bronze scalpel that Rasfer had concealed in his right hand. My master nodded at him and he reached down with his free hand and seized me and stretched me out, until it felt as though he were plucking my entrails out through my groin.

'What a fine pair of eggs we have here!' Rasfer grinned and showed me the scalpel, holding it up before my eyes. 'But I am going to feed them to the crocodiles, just as I did with your little girl-friend.' He kissed the blade.

'Please, my lord,' I begged, 'have mercy?' but my entreaties ended in a shrill cry as Rasfer slashed down with the blade. It felt as though a redhot skewer had been thrust up into my belly.

'Say goodbye to them, pretty boy.' Rasfer held up the sac of pale wrinkled skin and its pathetic contents. Then he began to rise, but my lord stopped him. 'You have not finished,' he told Rasfer quietly. 'I want all of it.'

Rasfer stared at him for a moment, not understanding the order. Then he began to chuckle until his belly bounced. 'By the blood of Horus,' he roared, 'from now on pretty boy will have to squat like a girl when he wants to piss!' . He struck again, then bellowed with laughter as he held up the finger of flesh that had once been the most intimate part of my body.

'Never mind, boy. You'll walk a lot lighter without that weight to carry around with you.' Staggering with laughter, he started towards the edge of the terrace as if to hurl them into the river, but once again my lord called to him sharply.

'Give them to me!' he ordered, and obediently Rasfer placed the bloody fragments of my manhood in his hands. For a few seconds my lord examined them curiously, and then he spoke to me again. 'I am not so cruel as to deprive you for ever of such fine trophies, my darling. I will send these to the embalmers, and when they are ready I will have them placed on a necklace surrounded with pearls and lapis lazuli. They will be my present to you at the next festival of Osiris. Thus at the day of your burial they can be placed in your tomb with you, and if the gods are kind, you may have the use of them in the afterlife.'

Those terrible memories should have ended at the moment when Rasfer staunched the bleeding with a ladle of boiling embalming lacquer from the brazier, and I was plunged into blessed oblivion by the unbearable intensity of the pain, but now I was trapped in the nightmare. It was all happening again. Only this time little Alyda was missing, and instead of the gelding-knife Rasfer held the whip of hippo-hide in his great hairy fist.

The whip was as long as the full stretch of Rasfer's arms and it tapered to the thickness of his little ringer at the point. I had watched him whittling it himself, shaving off the coarse outer layer from the long strip of cured hide until the inner skin was exposed, periodically pausing to test the balance and the heft of it, cutting it through the air until it keened and whined like the desert wind through the canyons of the hills of Lot. It was the colour of amber and Rasfer had polished it lovingly until it was smooth and translucent as glass, but so supple that he could bend it into a perfect arc between those bear-like paws. He had allowed the blood of a hundred victims to dry upon it and to dye the thin end of it to a lustrous patina that was aesthetically quite beautiful.

Rasfer was an artist with this awful tool. He could flick out and leave on the tender thigh of a young girl only a crimson weal that never broke the skin, but stung as viciously as a scorpion and left his victim writhing and weeping with the agony of it; or with a dozen hissing strokes he could strip the skin and flesh from a man's back and leave his ribs and the crest of his spine exposed.

He stood over me now and grinned as he flexed the long lash in his hands. Rasfer loved his work, and he hated me with all the force of his envy and the feelings of inferiority that my intelligence and looks and favour engendered in him.

My Lord Intef stroked my naked back and sighed. 'You are so wicked sometimes, my old darling. You try to deceive me to whom you owe the deepest loyalty. Nay, more than simple loyalty?to whom you owe your very existence.' He sighed again. 'Why do you force this unpleasantness upon me? You should know much better than to press the suit of that young jackanapes upon me. It was a ludicrous attempt, but I suppose that I understand why you made it. That childlike sense of compassion is one of your many weaknesses, and one day will probably be the cause of your complete downfall. However, at times I find it rather quaint and endearing and I might readily have forgiven you for it, but I cannot overlook the fact that you have endangered the market value of the goods that I placed in your care.' He twisted my head up so that my mouth was free to answer him. 'For that, you must be punished. Do you understand me?'

'Yes, my lord,' I whispered, but I rolled my eyes to watch the whip in Rasfer's hands. Once again my Lord Intef buried my face in his lap, and then he spoke to Rasfer above my head.

'With all your cunning, Rasfer. Do not break the skin, please. I do not want this delightfully smooth back marred permanently. Ten will do as a start. Count then aloud for us.'

I had watched a hundred or more unfortunates undergo this punishment, some of them warriors and vaunted heroes. Not one of them was able to remain silent under the lash of Rasfer. In any event it was best not to do so, for he took silence as a personal challenge to his skill. I knew this well, having travelled this bitter road before. I was quite prepared to swallow any stupid pride and pay tribute to Rasfer's art in a loud voice. I filled my lungs in readiness.

'One!' grunted Rasfer, and the lash fluted. The way a woman later forgets the full pain of childbirth, I had forgotten the exquisite sting of it, and I screamed even louder than I had intended.

'You are fortunate, my dear Taita,' my Lord Intef murmured in my ear. 'I had the priests of Osiris examine the goods last night. They are still intact.' I squirmed in his lap. Not only from the pain, but also at the thought of those lascivious old goats from the temple probing and prying into my little girl.

Rasfer had his own little ritual to draw out the punishment and to ensure that both he and his victim were able to savour the moment to the full. Between each stroke he jogged in a small circle around the barrazza, grunting exhortations and encouragement to himself, holding the whip at high port like a ceremonial sword. As he completed the circle he was in position for the next stroke, and he raised the lash high. 'Two!' he cried, and I shrieked again.

ONE OF LOSTRIS' SLAVE GIRLS WAS WAITING for me on the broad terrace of my quarters when I limped painfully up the steps from the garden.

'My mistress bids you attend her immediately,' she greeted me.

'Tell her that I am indisposed.' I tried to avoid the summons and, shouting for one of the slave boys to dress my injuries, I hurried through into my chamber in an attempt to rid myself of the girl. I could not face Lostris yet, for I dreaded having to report my failure, and having at last to make her face the reality "and the impossibility of her love for Tanus. The black girl followed me, ogling the livid weals across my back with delicious horror.

'Go tell your mistress that I am injured, and that I cannot come to her,' I snapped over my shoulder.

'She told me that you would try to wriggle out of it, but she told me also that I was to stay with you and see to it that you did not.'

'You are insolent for a slave,' I reprimanded her sternly as the boy anointed my back with a healing salve of my own concoction.

'Yes,' agreed the imp with a grin. 'But then so are you.' And she dodged the half-hearted slap I aimed at her with ease. Lostris is much too soft with her handmaidens.

'Go tell your mistress that I will come to her,' I capitulated.

'She said I must wait and make sure you did.'

So I had an escort as I passed the guards at the gate of the harem..The guards were eunuchs like myself, but, unlike me, they were portly and androgynous. Despite their corpulence, or perhaps because of it, they were powerful men and fierce. However, I had used my influence to secure both of them this cosy sinecure, so they passed me through into the women's quarters with a respectful salute.

The harem was not nearly as grand nor as comfortable as the quarters of the slave boys, and it was clear where my Lord Intef's real interest lay. It was a compound of mud-brick hutments surrounded by a high mud wall. The only gardens or decorations were those that Lostris and her maids had undertaken, with my assistance. The vizier's wives were too fat and lazy and caught up in the scandals and intrigues of the harem to exert themselves.

Lostris' quarters were those closest to the main gate, surrounded by a pretty garden with a lily pond and song-birds twittering in cages woven of split bamboo. The mud walls were decorated with bright murals of Nile scenes, of fish and birds and goddesses, that I had helped her paint.

Her slave girls were huddled in a subdued group at the doorway, and more than one of them had been weeping. Their faces were streaked with tears. I pushed my way past them into the cool, dark interior, and at once heard my mistress's sobs from the inner chamber. I hurried to her, ashamed that I had been so craven as to try to avoid my duty to her.

She was lying face down on the low bed, her entire body shaking with the force of her grief, but she heard me enter and whirled off the bed and rushed to me.

'Oh, Taita! They are sending Tanus away. Pharaoh arrives in Karnak tomorrow, and my father will prevail upon him to order Tanus to take his squadron up-river to Elephantine and the cataracts. Oh, Taita! It is twenty days' travel to the first cataract. I shall never see him again. I wish I were dead. I shall throw myself into the Nile and let the crocodiles devour me. I don't want to h've without Tanus?' All this in one rising wail of despair.

'Softly, my child.' I rocked her in my arms. 'How do you know all these terrible things? They may never happen.'

'Oh, they will. Tanus has sent me a message. Kratas has a brother in my father's personal bodyguard. He heard my father discussing it with Rasfer. Somehow my father has found out about Tanus and me. He knows that we were in the temple of Hapi alone. Oh, Taita, my father sent the priests to examine me. Those filthy old men did horrid things to me. It hurt so, Taita.'

I hugged her gently. It is not too often that I have the opportunity to do so, but now she hugged me back with all her strength. Her thoughts turned from her own injuries to her lover.

'I shall never see Tanus again,' she cried, and I was reminded of how young she truly was, not much more than a child, vulnerable and lost in her grief. 'My father will destroy him.'

'Even your father cannot touch Tanus,' I tried to reassure her. 'Tanus is a commander of a regiment of Pharaoh's own elite guard. He is the king's man. Tanus takes his orders only from Pharaoh, and he enjoys the full protection of the double crown of Egypt.' I did not add that this was probably the only reason that her father had not already destroyed him, but went on gently, 'While as for never seeing Tanus again, you will be playing opposite him in the pageant. I will make certain that there is a chance for the two of you to speak to each other between the acts.'

'My father will never lei the pageant go on now.'

'He has no alternative, unless he is prepared to ruin my production and risk Pharaoh's displeasure, and you can be certain that he will never do that.'

'He will send Tanus away, and have another actor play Horus,' she sobbed.

"There is no time to rehearse another actor. Tanus will play the god Horus. I will make that clear to my Lord Intef. You and Tanus will have a chance to talk. We will find a way out for the two of you.'

She gulped back her tears and looked up at me with complete trust. 'Oh, Taita. I know that you will find a way. You always do?' She broke off suddenly and her expression changed. Her hands moved over my back, exploring the ridged welts that Rasfer's whip had raised across it.

'I am sorry, mistress. I tried to put forward Tanus' suit, as I promised you I would, and all this is the consequence of my stupidity.'

She stepped behind me and lifted the light linen tunic I had donned' to hide my injuries, and she gasped. "This is Rasfer's work. Oh, my poor dear Taita, why did you not warn me that this would happen, that my father was so violently opposed to Tanus and to me?'

I was hard put not to gasp at this artless piece of effrontery, I who had pleaded and warned them and in return been accused of disloyalty. I managed to hold my peace, however, although my back still throbbed abominably.

At least my mistress's own misery was forgotten for the moment in her concern for my superficial injuries. She ordered me to sit on her bed and remove my tunic while she ministered to me, her genuine love and compassion making up for the lack of her medicinal skills. This distraction lifted her from the utter depths of her despair. Soon she was chattering away in her usual ebullient fashion, making plans to thwart her father's wrath and to reunite herself with Tanus. Some of these plans demonstrated her good common sense, while others, more far-fetched, merely pointed to her trusting youth and lack of knowledge and experience in the wicked ways of the world. 'I shall play such a fine role of Isis in the pageant,' she declared at one stage, 'and I shall make myself so, agreeable to Pharaoh that he will grant me any boon that I ask of him. Then I shall beg him for Tanus as my husband, and he will say?' here she mimicked the king's pompous ceremonial tones so cleverly that I was forced to grin, 'and he will say, "I declare the betrothal of Tanus, Lord Harrab, son of Pianki, and of the Lady Lostris, daughter of Intef, and I raise my good servant Tanus to the rank of Great Lion of Egypt and commander of all my armies. I further order that all the former estates of his father, the noble Pianki, Lord Harrab be returned to him?" ' Here she broke off in the middle of her ministrations to my wounds and flung her arms around my neck.

'It could happen like that, could it not, dear Taita? Please say that it could!'

'No natural man could resist you, mistress,' I smiled at her nonsense. 'Not even great Pharaoh himself.' If I had known then how close my words would turn out to being the truth, I think I should have placed a live coal on my tongue before I spoke them.

Her face was shining with hope once again. That was enough reward for me, and I donned my tunic again to bring to an end her too enthusiastic ministrations to my back.

'But now, mistress, if you are to make a beautiful and irresistible Isis, you must get some rest.' I had brought with me a potion of the powder of the sleeping-flower which is called the Red Shepenn. The seeds of this precious flower had first been brought into this very Egypt by the trade caravans from a mountainous land somewhere far to the east. I now cultivated the red blooms in my garden, and when the petals were fallen I scratched the seed carapace with a gold fork of three tines. Thick white milk flowed from these wounds, which I gathered and dried and treated in accordance with the formula I had evolved. The' powder could induce sleep, conjure up strange dreams or smooth out pain.

'Stay with me awhile, Taita,' she murmured as she settled down on the bed, curled like a sleepy kitten. 'Cuddle me to sleep like you did when I was a baby.' She was a baby still, I thought, as I took her in my arms.

'It will all turn out all right, won't it?' she whispered. 'We will live happily ever after, just like they do in your stories, won't we, Taita?'

When she was asleep" I kissed her forehead softly and covered her with a fur rug before I stole from her chamber.

ON THE FIFTH DAY OF THE FESTIVAL OF Osiris, Pharaoh came down-river to Karnak from his palace on Elephantine Island which was ten days' travel away by swift river galley. He came in full state with all his retinue to officiate at the ?? festival of the god.

Tanus' squadron had left Karnak three days previously, speeding away upstream to meet the great flotilla and escort it on the last stage of the voyage, so neither Lostris nor I had seen him since we had all three returned from the great river-cow hunt. It was a special joy for both of us then to see his galley come flying around the bend in the river, full on the current and with a strong desert wind abeam. The Breath of Horus was in the van of the fleet, leading it up from the south.

Lostris was in the grand vizier's train, standing behind her two brothers, Menset and Sobek. The two boys were comely and well-favoured, but there was too much of their father in them for my taste. Menset, the elder of the two, I particularly mistrusted, and the younger followed where his brother led.

I was standing further back in the ruck of courtiers and lesser functionaries from where I could keep an eye both on Lostris and on my Lord Intef. I saw the back of her neck flush with pleasure and excitement at the glimpse she had of Tanus' tall figure on the stern-tower of the Breath of Horus. The scales on his crocodile-skin breastplate gleamed in the simlight, and the spray of ostrich feathers on his helmet floated in the draught of the galley's passage.

Lostris was hopping with excitement and waving both slim arms above her head, but her squeals and her antics were lost in the roar of the vast crowd that lined both banks of the Nile to welcome their pharaoh. Thebes is the most populous city in the world, and I guessed that almost a quarter of a million souls had turned out to welcome the king. Meanwhile Tanus looked neither left nor right, but stared sternly ahead with his unsheathed sword held before his face in salute. The rest of his squadron followed the Breath of Horus in the wide vee of the egret formation, named for the pattern that those birds fly in as they return in the sunset to their roosts. All their standards and battle honours were streaming out in a fluttering blaze of rainbow colours, a noble show that set the crowds cheering and waving their palm-fronds wildly.

It was some time before the first vessel of the main convoy came wallowing round the bend behind them. It was laden with ladies and nobles of the king's entourage. It was followed by another, and then by a great untidy horde of vessels great and small. They came swarming downstream, transports filled with palace servants and slaves and all their accoutrements and paraphernalia, barges laden with oxen and goats and chickens for the kitchens, gilded and gaily painted vessels bearing cargoes of palace furniture and treasure, of nobles and lesser creatures, all uncomfortably jumbled together in a most unseamanlike fashion. In what contrast was the display put up by Tanus' squadron as it rounded-to downstream and held its geometrically spaced formation against the swift Nile current!

At last Pharaoh's state barge lumbered around the bend, and the cheering of the crowd rose to a crescendo. This huge vessel, the largest ever built by man, made its ponderous way towards where we were waiting to welcome it at the stone wharf below the grand vizier's palace.

I had plenty of time in which to study it and to muse how aptly its size and design, and the handling of it, reflected the present state and government of this very Egypt of ours?Egypt as she stood in the twelfth year of the rule of Pharaoh Mamose, the eighth of that name and line,,and the weakest yet of a weak and vacillating dynasty. The state barge was as long as five of the fighting galleys laid end to end, but its height and breadth were so ill-proportioned that they gravely offended my artistic instincts. Its massive hull was painted in the riotous colours that were the fashion of the age, and the figurehead of Osiris on the bows was gilded with real gold leaf. However, as she drew closer to the landing where we waited, I could see that the brilliant colours were faded in patches and her sides were zebra-striped in dun where her crew had defecated over the rail.

Amidships stood a tall deck-house, Pharaoh's private quarters, that was so solidly constructed of thick planks of precious cedar, and so stuffed with heavy furniture that the sailing characteristics of the barge were sadly affected. Atop this grotesque edifice, behind an ornate railing that was woven of fresh lilies, beneath a canopy of finely tanned gazelle skins skilfully sewn together and painted with images of all the major gods and goddesses, sat Pharaoh in majestic isolation. On his feet were sandals of gold filigree and his robe was of linen so pure that it shone like the high cumulus clouds of full summer. On his head he wore the tall double crown; the white crown of Upper Egypt with the head of the vulture goddess Nekhbet, combined with the red crown and the cobra head of Buto, the goddess of the Delta.

Despite the crown, the ironic truth was that this beloved sovereign of ours had lost the Delta almost ten years previously. In our turbulent days another pharaoh ruled in Lower Egypt, one who also wore the double crown, or at least his own version of it, a pretender who was our sovereign's deadly adversary, and whose constant wars against us drained both kingdoms of gold and the blood of the young men. Egypt was divided and torn by internal strife. Over the thousand or so years of our history, it had always been thus when weak men took on the mantle of pharaoh. It needed a strong, bold and clever man to hold the two kingdoms in his fists.

In order to turn the unwieldy vessel into the current and bring her to her moorings at the palace wharf, the captain should have steered close in to the far bank. If he had done so, he would have had the full breadth of the Nile in which to complete his turn. However, he had obviously misjudged the strength of wind and current and he began his turn from midstream. At first the barge swung ponderously across the current, listing heavily as the height of the deck-house caught the hot desert wind like a sail. Half a dozen boatswains raged about the lower deck with their whips rising and falling, the snapping of the lash on bare shoulders carrying clearly across the water.

Under the goading of the lash the rowers plied their paddles in a frenzy that churned the waters alongside the hull to foam, one hundred paddles a side pulling against each other and none of them making any effort to synchronize the stroke. Their curses and cries blended with the shouted orders of the four helmsmen who were struggling with the long steering-oar in the stern. Meanwhile, on the poop-deck, Nembet, the geriatric admiral and captain of the barge, alternately combed his fingers through his long scraggy grey beard and flapped his hands in impotent agitation.

High above this pandemonium sat Pharaoh, motionless as a statue and aloof from it all. Oh, verily this was our Egypt. Then the rate of the barge's turn bled away until she was no longer swinging but heading straight for where we stood on the bank, locked in chains by the pull of the current and the contrary push of the wind. Captain and crew, despite all their wild and erratic exertions, seemed powerless either to complete the manoeuvre and head her into the current, or to heave-to and prevent her from ploughing headlong into the granite blocks of 'the wharf and staving in her great gilded bows. As everyone realized what was about to happen, the cheers of the crowd watching from the shore slowly died away and an awful hush fell upon both banks of the Nile into which the shouting and the turmoil on the decks of the huge vessel carried all the more clearly.

Then suddenly all the eyes of the crowd were drawn downstream, as the Breath ofHorus broke from her station at the head of the squadron and came tearing up-river, driven by the flying paddles. In perfect unison those paddles dipped and pulled and swung and dipped again. She cut in so sharply under the bows of the barge mat the. crowd gasped with a sound higher than the wind in the papyrus beds. Collision seemed inevitable, but at the last possible moment Tanus signalled with a clenched fist lifted above bis head. Simultaneously both banks of rowers backed water and the helmsman put the steering-oar hard over.

The Breath ofHorus checked and paid away before the ponderous advance of the great barge. The two vessels touched as lightly as a virgin's kiss, and for an instant the stern-tower of the Breath of Horus was almost level with the barge's main deck.

In that instant Tanus poised himself on the bulwark of the tower. He had kicked off his sandals, divested himself of his armour, and thrown aside his weapons. Around his waist he had tied die end of a light flax line. With the line trailing behind him he leaped out across the gap between the two vessels.

As though awakening from a stupor, the crowd stirred and shook itself. If there was still one amongst them who did not know who Tanus was, he would know before this day was out. Of course, Tanus' fame had already been won in the river wars against the legions of the usurper in the Lower Kingdom. However, only his own troops had ever seen him in action. The reported deed never carries the same weight as the one that the eye sees for itself.

Now, before the gaze of Pharaoh, the royal flotilla and the entire populace of Kamak, Tanus leaped from one deck to the other and landed as lightly as a leopard.

'Tanus!' I am sure that it was my mistress, Lostris, who first called out his name, but I was next.

'Tanusl' I yelled, and then all those around me took up the cry. 'Tanus! Tanus! Tanus!' They chanted it like an ode to some newly discovered god.

The moment he landed on the deck of the barge, Tanus whirled and raced into the bows, hauling in the thin line hand over hand as he ran. The crew of his galley had spliced a heavy hawser, as thick as a man's arm, to the end of the carrying-line. Now they sent it across as Tanus lay back against the weight of it. With the muscles of his arms and back shining with sweat, he dragged it in.

By this time a handful of the barge's crew had realized what he was about, and rushed forward to help him. Under Tanus! direction they took three turns with the end of the hawser about the barge's bowsprit, and the instant it was securdd Tanus signalled his galley away.

The Breath of Horus leaped into the current, gathering speed swiftly. Then abruptly she came up short against the hawser, and the weight of the heavy vessel on the other end threw her back on her haunches. For a dreadful moment I thought she might capsize and be dragged under, but Tanus had anticipated the shock and signalled his crew to cushion it by skilfully backing the long paddles.

Although she was dragged down so low that she took in green water over her stem, the galley weathered it, bobbed up and came back taut on the hawser. For a long moment nothing happened. The galley's puny weight made no impression on the great ship's ponderous way. The two vessels were locked together as though a crocodile had an old bull buffalo by the snout but could not drag him from the bank. Then Tanus in the bows of the barge turned to face the disorganized crew. He made one authoritative gesture that caught all their attention, and a remarkable change came over them. They were waiting for his command.

Nembet was the commander of all Pharaoh's fleet with the rank of Great Lion of Egypt. Years ago he had been one of the mighty men, but now he was old and feeble. Tanus took over from him effortlessly, as though it were as natural as the force of the current and the wind, and the crew of the barge responded immediately.

'Pull!' He gestured to the port bank of oarsmen and they bent their backs and pulled with a will.

'Back-water!' He stabbed his clenched fist at the starboard side and they dug in hard with the pointed blades of their paddles. Tanus stepped to the rail and signalled to the helmsman of me Breath of Horus, masterfully coordinating the efforts of both crews. Still the barge was bearing down upon the wharf and now only a narrow strip of open water separated the vessel from the granite blocks.

Then at last, slowly, too slowly, she began to respond. The gaudily painted bows began to swing up into the current as the galley dragged mem round. Once again the cheering died away and that fateful hush fell upon us all as we waited for the enormous ship to crash into the wharf and tear out her own guts on the rock. When that happened there was no doubt what the consequences must be for Tanus. He had snatched command from the senile admiral and so must bear the full responsibility for all the old man's mistakes. When Pharaoh was dashed from his throne by the collision, when the double crown and all his dignity were sent rolling across the deck, and when the state barge sank beneath him and he was dragged from the river tike a drowning puppy before the gaze of all his subjects, men there would be both the insulted Admiral Nembet and my Lord Intef to encourage Pharaoh to bring the full weight of his displeasure to bear upon the presumptuous young upstart.

I stood helplessly and trembled for my dear friend, and then a miracle occurred. The barge was already so'close to running aground and Tanus so near to where I stood that his voice carried clearly to me. "Great Horus, help me now!' he cried.

There is no doubt at all in my mind that the .gods often take a hand in the affairs of men. Tanus is a Horus man, and Horus is the god of the wind.

The desert wind had blown for three days and nights out of the western desolation of the Sahara. It had blown at the strength of half a gale without a check for all that time, but now it dropped. It did not taper off, it simply ceased to blow at all. The wavelets mat had flecked the surface of the river flattened out, and the palms along the waterfront that had been vigorously shaking their fronds fell still, as though frozen by a sudden frost.

Released from the claws of the wind, the barge rolled back on to an even keel and yielded to the pull of the Breath of Horus. Her elephantine bows turned up into the current, and she came parallel with the wharf at the exact moment that her side touched the dressed stone and the rush of the Nile killed her forward-way and stalled her motionless in the water.

One last command from Tanus and, before the ship could gather stern-way, the mooring ropes were cast on to the wharf and swiftly garnered up by eager hands and made fast to the stone bollards. Lightly as a goose-down feather floating on the water, the great barge of state lay safe and serene at her berth, and neither the throne upon which Pharaoh sat, nor the high crown upon his head, had been disturbed by her moorage.

We, the onlookers, burst out in a roar of praise for the feat, and the name of Tanus rather than that of Pharaoh was on all our tongues. Modestly, and very prudently, Tanus made no attempt to acknowledge our applause. To draw any further attention to himself that might detract from the welcome that awaited the king would have been folly indeed, and would certainly have negated any royal favour that his exploit had earned him. Pharaoh was always jealous of his royal dignity. Instead, Tanus surreptitiously signalled the Breath of Horus alongside. When she was hidden from our view by the bulk of the barge, he dropped overside on to the galley's deck, quitting the stage on which he had just earned such distinction, and leaving it now to his king.

However, I saw the expression of fury and chagrin on the face of Nembet, the ancient admiral, the Great Lion of Egypt, as he came ashore behind Pharaoh, and I knew that Tanus had made himself another powerful enemy.

I WAS ABLE TO MAKE GOOD MY PROMISE to Lostris that very evening when I put the cast of the pageant through their dress rehearsal. Before the performance began I was able to give the two lovers almost an hour alone together.

hi the precincts of the temple of Osiris, which was to be our theatre for the pageant, I had set up tents to act as dressing-rooms for each of the principal players. I had purposely placed Lostris' tent a little apart from the others, screened from them by one of the huge stone columns that support the roof of the temple. While I stood on sentry duty at the entrance to the tent, Tanus lifted the opposite panel and slipped in under it.

I tried not to eavesdrop on their cries of delight as they first embraced, nor to the whispering and cooing, to the muffled laughter and to the small moans and gasps of their decorous love-making which followed. Although at this stage I would not have made any attempt to prevent it, I was convinced that they would not carry this love-making to its ultimate conclusion. Long afterwards both Lostris and Tanus separately confirmed this one for me. My mistress; had been a virgin on her wedding day. If only any of us had known how close upon us that wedding day was, I wonder how differently we might have acted then.

Although I was acutely aware that every minute that they were alone together in the tent increased the danger for all of us, still I could not bring myself to call enough and separate them. Although the welts on my back that Raster's whip had raised still burned, and although deep in that morass of my soul where I attempt to hide all my unworthy thoughts and instincts my envy for the lovers burned as painfully, still I let them stay together much longer than I should have done.

I did not hear my Lord Intef coming. He used to have his sandals shod in the softest kid-skin to muffle his footfalls. He moved silently as a ghost, and many a courtier and slave felt either Rasfer's whip or his noose on account of a careless word that my lord overheard on his noiseless peregrinations through the halls and corridors of the palace. However, over the years I developed an instinct that enabled me most times to sense his presence before he materialized out of the shadows. This instinct was not infallible, but that evening it stood me in good stead. When I looked round suddenly he was almost upon me, gliding between the pillars of the hypostyle hall towards me, slim and tall and deadly as an erect cobra.

'My Lord Intef!' I cried loudly enough to startle myself. 'I am honoured that you have come to witness our rehearsals. I would be deeply grateful for any advice or suggestions?' I was gabbling wildly in an attempt to cover my confusion and to alert the lovers in the tent behind me.

In both objects I succeeded better than I had any right to expect. I heard the sudden scuffle of consternation within the dressing-tent behind me as the lovers broke apart, and then the flutter of the rear panel of the tent as Tanus ducked out the way he had entered.

At any other time I would never have succeeded so easily in deceiving my Lord Intef. He would have read the guilt upon my face as clearly as I read the hieroglyphics on the temple walls or my own characters on this scroll; but that evening he was blinded by his own wrath, and intent only on taking me to task for my latest misdemeanour. He did not rage; or roar with anger. My Lord is at his most dangerous when his tone is mild and his smile silky.

'Dear Taita.' It was almost a whisper. 'I hear that you have altered some of the arrangements for the opening act of the pageant, despite the fact that I personally ordered them. I could not believe that you have been so presumptuous. I had to come all this way in the heat to find out for myself.'

I knew it was of no avail to feign innocence or ignorance, so I bowed my head and tried to look aggrieved. 'My lord. It was not I who ordered the changes. It was His Holiness, the abbot of the temple of Osiris?'

But my lord broke in impatiently, 'Yes, of course he did, but only after you put him up to it. Do you think I do not know both you and that mumbling old priest? He never had an original thought in his head, while you have nothing but.'

'My lord!'I protested.

'What devious little trick was it this time? Was it one of those convenient dreams sent to you by the gods?' my lord asked, his voice as soft as the rustle of one of the sacred cobras that infested the temple, sliding across the stone flags of the floor.

'My lord!' I did my best to look shocked by the accusation, although I had indeed given the good abbot a rather fanciful account of how Osiris in the guise of a black crow had visited me in my sleep to complain of the spilling of blood in his temple.

Up until that time the priest had voiced no objection to the realistic piece of theatre that my Lord Intef had planned for the amusement of Pharaoh. I had only resorted to dreams when all my efforts to dissuade my lord had failed. It was deeply abhorrent to me to be party to such an abomination as my lord had ordered to be performed in the first act of the pageant. Of course I am aware that certain savage peoples in the eastern lands make human sacrifice to their gods. I have heard that the Kassites, who live beyond the twin rivers Tigris and Euphrates, cast new-born babes into a fiery furnace. The caravan masters who have travelled in those distant lands speak of other atrocities performed in the name of religion, of young virgins slaughtered to promote the harvest or captives of war beheaded before the statues of a triple-headed god.

However, we Egyptians are a civilized people and we worship wise and just gods, not blood-crazed monsters. I had tried to convince my master of this. I had pointed out to him that only once before had a pharaoh made human sacrifice; when Menotep had slit the throats of the seven rebel princes in the temple of Seth and quartered their corpses and sent the embalmed fragments to the governors of each of the nomes as a warning. History still remembered the deed with distaste. Menotep is known to this day as the Bloody King.

'It is not human sacrifice,' my master had contradicted me. 'Merely a well-merited execution, to be carried out in a rather novel fashion. You will not deny, dear Taita, that the death penalty has always been an important part of our system of justice, will you? Tod is a thief. He has stolen from the royal coffers and he must die, if only as an example to others.'

It sounded reasonable, except that I knew he was not at all interested in justice, but rather in protecting his own treasure and in impressing Pharaoh, who so loved pageant and theatre. This had left me with no alternative but to dream for the benefit of the good abbot. Now my Lord In-tef's lip lifted in a smile which exposed his perfect teeth but which chilled my blood and raised the hairs on the nape of my neck.

'Here is a little piece of advice,' he whispered close to my face. f'I suggest that you have another dream tonight, so that whichever god it was that visited you last time has an opportunity to countermand his previous instructions to the abbot and to endorse my arrangements. If this does not happen, I will find some more work for Rasfer?that is my solemn promise to you.' He turned and strode away, leaving me both relieved that he had not discovered the lovers and miserable that I was forced to go ahead with the vile display which he had ordered.

Nevertheless, after my master had left, the rehearsal was a heartening success that revived my spirits. Lostris was in such a glow of happiness after her tryst with Tanus that her beauty was indeed divine, and Tanus in his youth and power was the young Horus incarnate.

Naturally I was perturbed by the entrance of my Osiris to the stage, aware as I now was of the fate that my Lord Intef had ordered for him. My Osiris was played by a handsome, middle-aged man named Tod who had been one of the bailiffs until he had been caught dipping into my Lord Intef's coffers to support a young and expensive courtesan of whom he was enamoured. I was not proud that it was my examination of the accounts that had brought to light the discrepancies.

My lord had released him from custody, where he was awaiting formal trial and sentencing, to play the part of the god of the underworld in the pageant. My lord had promised not to take the matter further if he fulfilled the role of Osiris satisfactorily. The unfortunate Tod was unaware of the hidden menace in this offer and threw himself into the act with pathetic enthusiasm, believing that he was about to earn his pardon. He could not know that, in the meantime, my lord had secretly signed his death warrant and handed the scroll to Rasfer, who was not only the state executioner but my choice to play Seth in our little production. It was my lord's intention that he should combine both roles on the following evening when the pageant was performed before Pharaoh. Although Rasfer was a natural choice for the role of Seth, I regretted having cast him in it as I watched him rehearse the opening scene with Tod, and I shuddered as I imagined how the main performance would differ from the rehearsal. After the rehearsal it was my most pleasant duty to escort my mistress back to the harem compound. She would not let me leave but kept me late listening to her excited resume of the day's extraordinary events and the role that Tanus had played in them.

'Did you see how he called upon the great god Horus and how the god came at once to his aid? Surely he has the full favour and protection of Horus, don't you agree? Horus will not let any evil befall us, of that I am now certain.'

There was much more of this happy fantasy, and no more talk of parting and suicide. How swiftly the winds of young love shift!

'After what Tanus did today, the way he saved the state barge from wrecking, surely he must also have earned Pharaoh's high favour, don't you think so, Taita? With favour of both the god and Pharaoh, my father can never succeed in having Tanus sent away now, can he, Taita?'

I was called upon to endorse every happy thought that occurred to her, and I was not allowed to leave the harem until I had memorized at least a dozen messages of undying love which I was sworn to carry to Tanus personally.

When, exhausted, I finally reached my own quarters, there was still no rest for me. Nearly all the slave boys were waiting for me, as excited and garrulous as my mistress had been. They also wanted Jo have my opinion of the day's events, and particularly of Tanus' rescue of Pharaoh's ship and the significance of that deed. They crowded around me on the terrace above the river as I fed my pets, and vied with each other for my attention.

'Elder brother, is it true that Tanus called upon the god for his help, and Horus intervened immediately? Did you see it happen? Some even say that the god appeared in his falcon shape and hovered over Tanus' head, spreading protective wings over him. Is it true?'

'Is it true, Akh, that Pharaoh has promoted Tanus to Companion of Pharaoh, and given him an estate of five hundred fed dan of fertile land on the riverside as reward?'

'Elder brother, they say that the oracle at the desert shrine of Thoth, the god of wisdom, has cast a horoscope for Tanus. The oracle divines that he will be the greatest warrior in the history of our Egypt and that, one day, Pharaoh will favour him above all others.' It is amusing now to look back on these childish prattles, and to realize the strange truths that were adumbrated in them, but at the time I dismissed them as I did the children, with mock severity.

As I composed myself to sleep, my last thought was that the populace of the twin towns of Luxor and Karnak had taken Tanus to their hearts completely, but that this was an onerous and dubious distinction. Fame and popularity breed envy in high places, and the adulation of the mob is fickle. They often take as much pleasure in tearing down the idols that they have grown tired of, as they did in elevating them in the first place.

It is safer by far to live unseen and unremarked, as I always attempt to do.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE SIXTH DAY OF the festival, Pharaoh moved in solemn procession from his villa in the midst of the royal estates in the open country between Karnak and Luxor, down the ceremonial avenue lined with statues of granite lions, to the temple of Osiris on the bank of the Nile.

The great sledge on which he rode was so tall that the dense crowds lining the avenue were forced to strain their necks backwards to look up at him on his great gilded throne as he trundled by, drawn by twenty pure white bullocks with massive humped shoulders and wreaths of flowers on their horned heads. The skids of the sledge ground harshly over the paving and scarred the stone slabs.

One hundred musicians led the procession, strumming the lyre and the harp, beating the cymbal and the drum, shaking the rattle and the sistrum, and blowing on the long straight hom of the oryx and on the curling horn of the wild ram. A choir of a hundred of the finest voices in Egypt followed them, singing hymns of praise to Pharaoh and that other god Osiris. Naturally I led the choir. Behind us followed an honour guard from the Blue Crocodile regiment led by Tanus himself. The crowds raised a special cheer for him as, all plumed and armoured, he strode past. The unmarried maidens shrieked and more than one of them sank swooning in the dust, overcome by the hysteria that his new-won fame engendered.

Behind the guard of honour came the vizier and his high-office bearers, then the nobles and their wives and children, then a detachment of the Falcon regiment, and finally Pharaoh's great sledge. In all, this was an assembly of several thousand of the most wealthy and influential persons in the Upper Kingdom.

As we approached the temple of Osiris, the abbot and all his priests were drawn up on the staircase between the tall entrance pylons to welcome Pharaoh Mamose. The temple had been freshly painted and the bas-relief on the outer walls was dazzling with colour in the warm yellow glow of the sunset. A gay cloud of banners and flags fluttered fiom their poles set in the recesses of the outer wall.

At the base of the staircase Pharaoh descended from his carriage and in solemn majesty began the climb up the one hundred steps. The choir lined both sides of the staircase. I was on the fiftieth step and so I was able to study the king minutely during the few seconds that it took for him to pass close to me.

I already knew him well, for he had been a patient of mine, but I had forgotten how small he was?that is, small for a god. He stood not ~as tall as my shoulder, although the high double crown made him seem much more impressive. His arms were folded across his chest in the ritual posture and he carried the crook and the flail of his royal office and his godhead. I remarked as I had before that his hands were hairless, smooth and almost feminine, and that his feet also were small and neat. He wore rings on all his fingers and on his toes, amulets on his upper arms and bracelets on his wrists. The massive pectoral plate of red gold on his chest was inlaid with many colours of faience depicting the god Thoth bearing the feather of truth. That piece of jewellery was a splendid treasure almost five hundred years old and . had been worn by seventy kings before him.

Under the double crown, his face was powdered dead white like that of a corpse. His eyes were dramatically outlined with startling jet black and his lips were rouged crimson. Under the heavy make-up his expression was petulant, and his lips were thin and straight and humourless. His eyes were shifty and nervous, as well they might be, I reflected.

The foundations of this great House of Egypt were cracked, and the kingdom riven and shaken. Even a god has his worries. Once his domain had stretched from the sea, across the seven mouths of the Delta, southwards to Assoun and the first cataract?the greatest empire on earth. He and his ancestors had let it all slip away, and now his enemies swarmed at his shrunken borders, clamouring like hyena and jackal and vulture to feast on the carcass of our Egypt.

In the south were the black hordes of Africa, in the north along the coast of the great sea were the piratical sea-people, and along the lower reaches of the Nile the legions of the false Pharaoh. In the west were the treacherous Bedouin and the sly Libyan, while in the east new hordes seemed to rise up daily, their names striking terror into a nation grown timid and hesitant with defeat. Assyrians and Medes, Kassites and Humans and Hittites?there seemed no end to their multitudes.

What advantage remained in our ancient civilization if it were grown feeble and effete with its great age? How were we to resist the barbarian in his savage vigour, his cruel arrogance and his lust for rapine and plunder? I was certain that this pharaoh, like those who had immediately preceded him, was not capable of leading the nation back to its former glories. He was incapable even of breeding a male heir.

This lack of an heir to the empire of Egypt seemed to obsess him even more than the loss of the empire itself. He had taken twenty wives so far. They had given him daughters, a virtual tribe of daughters, but no son. He would not accept that the fault lay with him as sire. He had consulted every doctor of renown in the Upper Kingdom and visited every oracle and every important shrine.

I knew all this because I was one of the learned doctors he had sent for. I admit that at the time I had felt some trepidation in prescribing to a god, and that I had wondered why he should need to consult a mere mortal on such a delicate subject. Nevertheless, I had recommended a diet of bull's testicles fried in honey and counselled him to find the most beautiful virgin in Egypt and take her to his marriage-bed within a year of the first flowering of her woman's moon.

I had no great faith in my own remedy, but bull's testicles, when cooked to my recipe, are a tasty dish, while I reckoned that the search for the most beautiful virgin in the land might distract Pharaoh and prove not only amusing but pleasurable as well. From a practical point of view, if the king bedded a sufficient number of young ladies, then surely one of them must eventually drop a male pup into his harem.

Anyhow, I consoled myself that my treatment was not as drastic as some of the others proposed by my peers, particularly those disgusting remedies dreamed up by the quacks in the temple of Osiris who call themselves doctors. If not actually efficacious, my recommendations would at least do no harm. That was what I believed. How wrong ;the fates would prove me, and if only I had known the consequences of my folly, I would have taken Tod's place in the pageant rather than have given Pharaoh such frivolous counsel.

I was amused and flattered when I heard that Pharaoh must have taken my advice seriously, and that he had ordered his nomarchs and his governors to scour the length'of the land from El Amarna to the cataracts to find bulls with succulent balls and any virgin who might fit my specifications for the mother of his first son. My sources at the king's court informed me that he had already rejected hundreds of aspiring applicants for the- title of the most beautiful virgin in the land.

Then the king was swiftly past me and gone into the temple to the keening of the priests and the obsequious bobbing of the abbot. The grand vizier and all his train followed closely, and then there was an undignified rush of lesser citizens to find places from which to watch the passion play. Space in the temple was limited. Only the mighty and the noble and those rich enough to bribe the thieving priests were allowed into the inner courtyard. The others were forced to watch through the gates from the outer court. Many thousands of the citizenry would be disappointed and would have to be content with a secondhand account of the pageant. Even I, the impresario, had great difficulty in fighting my way through the press of humanity, and I only succeeded when Tanus saw my predicament and sent two of his men to rescue me and force a path for me into the precincts reserved for the actors.

Before the pageant could begin, we were obliged to endure a succession of flowery speeches, firstly from the local functionaries and government ministers, and then from the grand vizier in person. This interlude of speechifying gave me the opportunity to make certain that all the arrangements for the pageant were perfect. I went from tent to tent, checking the costumes and the make-up of each of my actors, and soothing last-minute attacks of temperament and stage-fright.

The unfortunate Tod was nervously dreading the possibility that his performance might not please my Lord Intef. I was able to assure him that it most certainly would, and then I administered to him a draught of the Red Shepenn, which would deaden the pain that he was about to have inflicted lipon him.

When I came to Rasfer's tent he was drinking wine with two of his cronies from the palace guard and, with a whetstone, laying an edge on his short bronze sword. I had created his make-up to render him even more repulsive, which was not an easy feat given the high plateau of ugliness from which we started. I realized how well I had succeeded as he leered at me with blackened teeth and offered me a cup of the wine.

'How does your back feel now, pretty, boy? Have a taste of a1 man's drink! Perhaps it will give you balls again.' I am accustomed to his taunts and I kept my dignity as I told him that my Lord Intef had countermanded the abbot's orders and that the first act was to be played out in the original form.

'I have spoken to Lord Intef already.' He held up the sword. 'Feel the edge, eunuch. I want to make certain that it meets with your approval.' I left him feeling a little queasy.

Although Tanus would not be on stage until the second act, he was already in costume. Relaxed and smiling, he clasped my shoulder. 'Well, old friend, this is your opportunity. After this evening your fame as a playwright will spread throughout Egypt.'

'As yours has already. Your name is on every lip,' I told him, but he laughed it away with careless modesty as I went on, 'Do you have your closing declamation prepared, Tanus? Would you like to recite it to me now?'

Traditionally, the actor who played Horus would close the pageant with a message to Pharaoh, ostensibly from the gods but in reality from his own subjects. In olden times this had been the one occasion during the year when the populace, through the agency of the actor, could bring to the king's notice matters of concern which they were not able to address to him at any other time. However, during the rule of this last dynasty of kings the tradition had fallen away, and the closing speech had become merely another eulogy to the divine pharaoh.

For days past I had been asking Tanus to rehearse his speech for me, but every time he had put me off with excuses so lame that I was by now thoroughly suspicious of his intentions. "This is the last opportunity,' I insisted, but he laughed at me.

'I have decided to let my speech be as much a surprise to you as I hope it will be to Pharaoh. That way you should both enjoy it more.' And there was nothing I could do to persuade him. At times he can be far and away the most headstrong and obstinate young ruffian I have ever encountered. I left him in not a little dudgeon, and went to find more convivial company.

As I stooped in throughjhe entrance of Lostris' dressing-tent, I froze with shock. Even though I had designed her costume myself and instructed her handmaidens as to exactly how I wanted her powder and rouge and eye-paint applied, still I was not prepared for the ethereal vision that stood before me now. For a moment I was convinced that another miracle had taken place and that the goddess had indeed risen up from the underworld to take my mistress's place. I gasped aloud and had actually begun to sink to my knees in superstitious awe when my mistress giggled and roused my from my delusion.

'Isn't this fun? I cannot wait to see Tanus in full costume. I am sure he must look like the god himself.' She turned slowly to allow me to appraise her own costume, smiling at me over her shoulder.

'No more godlike than you, my lady,' I whispered. 'When will the play begin?' she demanded impatiently. 'I am so excited that I can wait no longer.'

I cocked my ear to the panel of the tent and listened for a moment to the drone of the speeches in the great hall. I realized that this was-the final oration and that at any moment my Lord Intef would call upon my players to perform.

I took Lostris' hand and squeezed it. 'Remember the long pause and the haughty look before you begin your opening speech,' I cautioned her, and she slapped my shoulder playfully.

'Away with you, you old fuss-pot, it will all go perfectly, you'll see.' And at that moment I heard my Lord Intef's voice raised.

'The divine god Pharaoh Mamose, the Great House of Egypt, the Support of the Realm, the Just, the Great, the All-Seeing, the All-Merciful?' The titles and honorifics continued while I hurried out of Lostris' tent and made my way to my opening position behind the central pillar. I peered around the column and saw that the inner courtyard of the temple was packed and that Pharaoh and his senior wives sat in the front rank on low benches of cedar wood, sipping cool sherbet or nibbling dates and sweetmeats.

My Lord Intef was addressing them from the front of the raised platform below the altar that was our stage. The main body of the stage was still .hidden from the audience by the linen curtains. I surveyed it for one last time, although it was too late to do anything further about it now.

Behind the curtains the set was decorated with palms and acacia trees that the palace gardeners had transplanted under my instruction. My masons had been taken from the work on the king's tomb to build a stone cistern at the back of the temple from which a stream could be diverted across the stage to represent the river Nile.

At the rear of the stage, hanging from floor to ceiling, were tightly stretched sheets of linen on which the artists from the necropolis had painted marvellous landscapes. In the half-light of the dusk and the flicker of the torches in "their brackets the effect was so realistic as to transport the beholder into a different world in a distant time.

There were other delights that I had prepared for Pharaoh's amusement, from cages of animals, birds and butterflies that would be released to simulate the creation of the world by the great god Ammon-Ra, to flares and torches that I had doctored with chemicals to burn with brilliant flames of crimson and green, and flood the stage with eerie light and smoke-clouds, like those of the underworld where the gods live.

'Mamose, son of Ra, may you be granted eternal life! We your loyal subjects, the citizens of Thebes, beg you to draw nigh and give your divine attention to this poor play that we dedicate to Your Majesty.'

My Lord Intef concluded his address of welcome and resumed his seat. To a fanfare of hidden rams' horns, I stepped out from behind the pillar and faced the audience. They had endured discomfort and boredom on the hard flagstones, and by now were ripe for the entertainment to begin. A raucous cheer greeted my entrance and even Pharaoh smiled in anticipation.

I held up both hands for silence, and only when it was total did I begin to speak my overture.

'While I walked in the sunlight, young and filled with the vigour of youth, I heard the fatal music in the reeds by the bank of the Nile. I did not recognize the sound of this harp, and I had no fear, for I was in the full bloom of my manhood and secure in the affection of my beloved.

'The music was of surpassing beauty. Joyously I went to find the musician, and could not know that he was Death and that he played his harp to summoame alone.' We Egyptians are fascinated by death, and I had at once touched a deep chord within my audience. They sighed and shuddered.

'Death seized me and bore me up in his skeletal arms towards Ammon-Ra, the sun god, and I was become one with the white light of his being. At a great distance I heard my beloved weep, but I could not see her and all the days of my life were as though they had never been.' This was the first public recitation of my prose, and I knew almost at once that I had them, their faces were fascinated and intent. There was not a sound in the temple.

'Then Death set me down in a high place from which I could see the world like a shining round shield in the blue sea of the heavens. I saw'all men and all creatures who have ever lived. Like a mighty river, tune ran backwards before mine eyes. For a hundred thousand years I watched their strivings and their deaths. I watched all men go from death and old .age to infancy and birth. Time became more and more remote, going back until the birth of the first man and the first woman. I watched them at the moment of their birth and then before. At last there were no men upon the earth and only the gods existed.

'Yet still the river of time flowed back beyond the time of the gods into Nun, into the time of darkness and primordial chaos. The river of time could flow no further back and so reversed itself. Time began to run forward in the manner that was familiar to me from my days of life upon the earth, and I watched the passion of the gods played out before me.' My audience were all of them well versed in the theology of our pantheon, but none of them had ever heard the mysteries presented in such a novel fashion. They sat silent and enthralled as I went on.

'Out of the chaos and darkness of Nun rose Ammon-Ra, He-Who-Creates-Himself. I watched Ammon-Ra stroke his generative member, masturbating and spurting out his seminal seed in mighty waves that left the silver smear that we know as the Milky Way across the dark void. From this seed were generated Geb and Nut, the earth and the heaven.' 'Bak-her!' a single voice broke the tremulous silence of the temple. 'Bak-her.' Amen!' The old abbot had not been able to contain himself, and now he endorsed my vision of the creation. I was so astonished by his change of heart that I almost forgot my next line. After all, he. had been my sternest critic up to that time. I had won him over completely, and my voice soared in triumph.

'Geb and Nut coupled and copulated, as man and women do, and from their dreadful union were bom the gods Osiris and Seth, and the goddesses Isis and Nephthys.'

I made a wide gesture and the linen curtains were drawn slowly aside to reveal the fantasy world that I had created. Nothing like this had ever been seen in Egypt before and the audience gasped with amazement. With measured tread I withdrew, and my place upon the stage was taken by the god Osiris. The audience recognized him instantly by the tall, bottle-shaped head-dress, by his arms crossed over his chest and by the crook and the flail he held before him. Every household kept his statuette in the family shrine.

A droning cry of reverence went up from every throat, and indeed the sedative that I had administered to Tod glittered weirdly in his eyes and gave him a strange, unearthly presence that was convincingly godlike. With the crook and the flail Osiris made mystical gestures and declaimed in sonorous tones, 'Behold Atur, the river!'

Once more the audience rustled and murmured as they recognized the Nile. The Nile was Egypt and the centre of the world.

'Bak-her!' another voice called out, and, watching from my hidden place amongst the pillars, I was astonished and delighted as I realized who had spoken. It was Pharaoh. My play had both secular and divine endorsement. I was certain mat from now on mine would become the authorized version, replacing the thousand-year-old original. I had found my place in immortality. My name would live on down the millennium.

Joyfully I signalled for the cistern to be opened and the waters began to flow across our stage. At first the audience did not comprehend, and men they realized that they were actually witnessing the revelation of the great river, and a shout went up from a thousand throats, 'BaK-her! Bak-her!' 'Behold the waters rise!' cried Osiris, and obediently the Nile was swollen by the inundation.

'Behold the waters fall!, cried the god, and they shrank at his command. 'Now they will rise again!'

I had arranged for buckets of dye to be added to the water as it poured out of the cistern at the rear of the temple. First a green dye to simulate the low-water period, and then, as it rose again, a darker dye that faithfully emulated the colour of the silt-laden waters of the high inundation.

'Now behold the insects and birds upon the earth!' ordered Osiris, and the cages at the rear of the stage were opened and a shrieking, chattering, swirling cloud of wild birds and gorgeously coloured butterflies filled the temple. The watchers were like children, enchanted and enthralled, reaching up to snatch the butterflies from the air and then release them again to fly out between the high pillars of the temple. One of the wild birds, a long-billed hoopoe marvellously patterned in colours of white and cinnamon and black, flew down unafraid and settled on Pharaoh's crown. The crowd was delighted. 'An omen!' they cried. 'A blessing on the king. May he live for ever!' and Pharaoh smiled.

It was naughty of me, but afterwards I hinted to my Lord Intef that I had trained the bird to single out Pharaoh, and although it was of course quite impossible, he believed me. Such is my reputation with animals and birds.

On the stage Osiris wandered through the paradise mat he had created, and the mood was set for the dramatic moment when, with a blood-chilling shriek, Seth bounded on to the stage. Although they had been expecting it, still the powerful and hideous presence shocked the audience, and the women screamed and covered their faces, only to peer out again from between trembling ringers.

'What is mis you have done, brother?' Seth bellowed in jealous rage. 'Do you set yourself above me? Am I not also a god? Do you hold all creation to yourself alone, mat I, your brother, may not share it with you?'

Osiris answered him calmly, his dignity remote and cool as the drug held him in its thrall. 'Our father, Ammon-Ra, has given it to us both. However, he has also given us the right to choose how we dispose of it, for good or for evil?' The words that I had put into the mouth of the god reverberated through the temple. They were the finest that I had written, and the audience hung upon them. However, I alone of all of mem knew what was coming, and the beauty and the power of my own composition were soured as I steeled myself for it.

Osiris drew to the close of his speech. 'This is the world as I have revealed it. If you wish to share it in peace and brotherly love, then you are welcome. However, if you come in warlike rage, if evil and hatred fill your heart, then I order you gone.' He lifted his right arm all draped in the gleaming diaphanous linen of his robe and pointed the way for Seth to leave the paradise of Earth.

Seth hunched those huge, hairy shoulders like a buffalo bull, and he bellowed so mat the spittle flew from his lips in a cloud that was flavoured by the rotting teeth in his jaws. I could smell it from where I stood. He lifted high the bronze broad-sword and rushed at his brother. This had never been rehearsed, and it took Osiris completely by surprise. He stood with his right arm still outstretched, and the blade hissed with the power of the stroke as it swung down. The hand was lopped off at the wrist as cleanly as I would prune a shoot from the vine that grows over my terrace. It fell at Osiris' feet and lay there with the fingers fluttering feebly.

The surprise was so complete and the sword so sharp that for a long moment Osiris did not move, except to sway slightly on his feet. The audience must have believed that this was another theatrical trick, and that the fallen hand was a dummy. The blood did not come at once, which lulled them further. They were intensely interested but not alarmed, until suddenly Osiris reeled back and with a dreadful cry clutched at the stump of his lower arm;' Only then did the blood burst out between his fingers and sprayed down his white robe, staining it like spilt wine. Still clutching his stump, Osiris staggered across the stage and began to scream. That scream, high and clear with mortal agony, broke the mood of the spectators' complacency. They knew then for the first time that what they were witnessing was not make-believe, but they were trapped in horrified silence.

Before Osiris could reach the edge of the stage, Seth came bounding after him oik those thick bow-legs. He seized the stump of Osiris' arm and used it as a handle to drag him back into the centre of the stage, where he threw him sprawling full-length on the stone flags. The tinsel crown tumbled from Osiris' head and the plaits of dark hair fell to his shoulders as he lay in a spreading puddle of his own blood.

'Please spare me,' Osiris shrieked, as Seth stood over him, and Seth laughed. It was a full-throated roar of genuine amusement. Rasfer had become Seth, and Seth was hugely enjoying himself.

That savage laughter woke the audience from its trance. However, the illusion was complete. They no longer believed that they were watching a play, and for all of them this terrible spectacle had become reality. Women screamed and men roared with fury as they witnessed the murder of their god.

'Spare him! Spare the great god Osiris!' they howled, but not one of them rose from his seat or rushed on to the stage to attempt to prevent the tragedy from being played out.

They knew that the straggles and passions of the gods were beyond the influence of mortal men.

Osiris reached up and pawed at Seth's legs with his one remaining hand. Still laughing, Seth grabbed bis wrist and pulled his arm out to its full length, inspecting it as a butcher might inspect the shoulder of a goat before he sections it.

'Cut it off!' screamed a voice in the crowd, thick with the lust for blood. The mood had swung again.

'Kill him!' screamed another. It has always troubled me how the sight of blood and violent death affects even the mildest of men. Even I was stirred by this terrible scene, sickened and horrified, it is true, but beneath it stirred by a revolting excitement.

With a casual sweep of the blade, Seth struck off the arm, and Osiris fell back, leaving the twitching limb in Seth's red fist. He was trying to rise to his feet, but he had no hands to support himself. His legs kicked spasmodically, and his head whipped from side to side, and still he screamed. I tried to force myself to turn away, but though my gorge rose and scalded the back of my throat, still I had to watch.

Seth hacked the arm into three pieces through the joint of the wrist and the elbow. One at a time he hurled the fragments into the packed ranks of the audience. As they spun through the air they sprinkled those below with drops of ruby. They roared like the lions hi Pharaoh's zoo at feeding-time, and held up their hands to catch these holy relics of their god.

Seth worked on with dedicated gusto. Osiris' feet he chopped off at the ankles. Then the calves at the knees, and the thighs at the hip joints. As he threw each of these to mem, the mob clamoured for more.

"The talisman of Seth!' howled a voice amongst them. 'Give us the talisman of Seth!' and the cry was taken up. According to the myth, the talisman is the most powerful of all the magical charms. The person who has it in his possession controls all the dark forces of the underworld, It is the only one of the fourteen segments of Osiris' body that was never recovered by Isis and her sister Nephthys from the far corners of the earth to which Seth scattered them. The talisman of Seth is that same part of the body that Rasfer deprived me of, and which forms the centre-piece of that beautiful necklace that was the cynical gift of my Lord Intef. 'Give us the talisman of Seth!' the mob howled, and Seth reached down and lifted the red sodden tunic of the limbless trunk at his feet. He was still laughing. I shuddered as I recognized that merciless sound that I had heard so often at my own punishment sessions. In sympathy I experienced once again the sudden fire in my groin as the short sword flashed in Seth's hairy paw, already wet and running with his victim's blood, and he lifted on high the piteous relic.

The crowd pleaded for it. 'Give it to us,' ttfey begged him. 'Give us the power of the talisman.' The spectacle had transformed them into ravening beasts.

Seth ignored their pleas. 'A gift,' he cried. 'A gift from one god to another. I Seth, god of darkness, dedicate this talisman to the god-Pharaoh, Mamose the divine.' And he hopped down the stone stairs on those powerful bow-legs and placed the relic at Pharaoh's feet.

To my amazement the king leaned forward and gathered it up to himself. His expression beneath the powder and paint was spellbound,"as though this was the true relic of the god. I am sure that at that moment he truly believed it was. He held it in his right hand through all that ensued.

His gift accepted, Seth rushed back on to the stage to complete his butchery. The thing that haunts me still is that the poor dismembered creature was alive and sensate to the very end. I realized that the drug I had given Tod had done little to dull his senses. I saw the terrible agony in his eyes as he lay in the lake of his own blood and rolled his head from side to side, the only part that remained to him to move.

For me, then, it came as an intense relief when at last Seth struck off the head and held it up by its thick plaited locks for the crowd to admire. Even then, the poor creature's eyes swivelled wildly in their sockets as he looked for the very last time on this world. At last they dulled and glazed over, and Seth tossed the head to them.

Thus the first act of our pageant ended in swelling and rapturous applause that threatened to shake the granite pillars of the temple from their bases.

DURING THE INTERMISSION MY SLAVE helpers cleaned away the gruesome evidence of the slaughter from the set. I was particularly concerned that my Lady Lostris should not realize what had truly taken place in the first act. I wished her to believe that all had gone as we had rehearsed it. So I had arranged that she stay in her tent, and that one of Tanus' men remain at the entrance to keep her there, and also to ensure that none of her Cushite maidens were allowed to peep out at the first act and rush back to Lostris with a report. I knew that if she realized the truth, she would be too distraught to play her part. While my helpers used buckets of water from our stage Nile to wash away the ghastly evidence, I hurried to my mistress's tent to reassure her and to satisfy myself that my precautions to shield her had been effective.

'Oh, Taita, I heard the applause,' she greeted me happily. 'They love your play. I am so happy for you. You so richly deserve this success.' She chuckled in a conspiratorial fashion. 'It sounded as though they believed the murder of Osiris was real, and the buckets of ox-blood with which you drenched Tod were truly the blood of the god.'

'Indeed, my lady, they seemed totally deceived by our little tricks,' I agreed, although I still felt faint and ill from what I had just lived through.

My Lady Lostris suspected nothing, and when I led her out on to the stage, she barely glanced at the grisly stains that remained upon the stones. I posed her in her opening position, and adjusted the torchlight to flatter her. Even though I was accustomed to it, still her beauty choked my throat and made my eyes sting with tears.

I left her concealed by the linen curtains, and stepped out to face my audience. There was no sarcastic applause to greet me this time. Every one of them, from Pharaoh to the meanest vassal, was captive to my voice, as in my lambent prose I described the mourning of Isis and her sister Nephthys at the death of their brother.

When I stepped down and the curtain was drawn aside to reveal the grieving figure of Isis, the audience gasped aloud at her loveliness. After the horror and blood of the first act, her presence was all the more moving.

Isis began to sing the lament for the dead, and her voice thrilled through the gloomy halls of the temple. As her head moved to the cadence of her voice, the torchlight was reflected in a darting and flickering shaft from the bronze moon that surmounted her horned headdress.

I watched Pharaoh attentively as she sang. His eyes never left her face, and his lips moved silently in sympathy with the words that swelled from her throat.

My heart is a wounded gazelle,

torn by the lion claws of my grief?

She lamented and the king and all his train grieved with her.

There is no sweetness in the honeycomb,

no perfume remains in the desert blossom.

My soul is an empty temple,

deserted by the god of love.

In the front rank one or two of the king's wives were snuffling and blubbering, but nobody even glanced at them.

I look on death's grim face with a smile.

Gladly would I follow him,

if he could lead me to the arms of my dear lord.

By now not only the royal wives but every one of the women were weeping, and most of the men also. Her words and her beauty were too much for them to resist. It seemed impossible that a god should show the same emotions as mortal men, but the slow tears were cutting runnels through the white powder on Pharaoh's cheeks, and he blinked his heavy, kohl-darkened eyelids like an owl as he stared at my Lady Lostris.

Nephthys entered and sang a duet with her sister, then hand-in-hand the two women went in search of the scattered fragments of Osiris' corpse.

Of course I had not placed the actual dismembered portions of Tod's corpse for them to find. During the intermission my helpers had retrieved these and carried them away to the'embalmers on my instructions. I would pay for Tod's funeral out of my own purse. It seemed the very least that I could do to compensate the unfortunate creature for my own part in his murder. Despite the missing portion of his anatomy that Pharaoh still held in his hand, I hoped the gods might make an exception in his case and allow Tod's shade to pass into the underworld, and that there he might not think too badly of me. It is wise to have friends wherever you can, in this world and the next.

To represent the body of the god I had the funeral artists from the necropolis build for me a magnificent mummy car-tonnage, depicting Osiris in his full regalia and in the death pose with his arms folded across his chest. This container I had cut 'into thirteen sections that fitted together like a child's building-blocks.

As the sisters retrieved each of these sections they sang a hymn of praise to the god's parts, to his hands and feet, to his limbs and trunk, and finally to his divine head.

Such eyes, like stars set in the heavens,

must shine for ever.

Death should never dim such beauty,

nor the funeral wrappings contain such majesty.

When at last the two sisters had reassembled the complete body of Osiris, except for the missing talisman, they pondered aloud how they could return it to life once more.

This was my opportunity to add to the pageant that essential element that makes any theatrical production appeal to the popular taste. There is a broad lascivious streak in most of us, and the playwright and the poet does well to bear this in mind if he hopes to have his work appreciated by the main body of his audience.

"There is but one certain way to bring our dear lord and brother back to life.' I placed the words in the mouth of the goddess Nephthys. 'One of us must perform the act of generation with his shattered body to make it whole again and to fan the spark of life within it.'

The audience stirred and leaned forward with anticipation at this suggestion. It had elements to appeal to even the most prurient of those present, including incest and necrophilia.

I had agonized over how I would represent upon the stage this episode in the myth of the resurrection of Osiris. My mistress had shocked me when she had declared herself willing to carry her role through to the end. She had even had the effrontery to point out, with that impudent grin of hers, that she might gain some valuable knowledge and experience from doing so. I was not certain if she was jesting or if she would really have gone through with it; however, I would not give her the opportunity to demonstrate her good faith or lack of it. Her reputation and the honour of her family were too valuable to trifle with.

So it was that at my signal, the linen curtains were drawn once more and my Lady Lostris quickly left the stage. Her place was taken by one of the upper-class courtesans who usually plied her trade in a palace of love near the port. I had hired this wench, from amongst several that I had interviewed, because of her fine young body that so much resembled that of my mistress. Of course, in facial beauty she could not come close to my Lady Lostris, but then I know of none who could.

As soon as the substitute goddess was in position, the torches at the rear of the stage were lit so as to cast her shadow upon the curtain. She began to disrobe in the most provocative manner. The males in the audience cheered on her shadowy gyrations, convinced that they were watching my Lady Lostris. The harlot responded to this encouragement with an increasingly lewd display that was almost as well received as the slaughter of Osiris in the first act.

Now came that action of the play that had given me, the author, considerable pause, for how could I contrive fecundity without a stout peg to hang it on? We had just seen Osiris forcefully deprived of his. In the end I was forced to stoop to that tired old theatrical device that I so scorned in the work of other playwrights, namely the intervention of the gods and their supernatural powers.

While my Lady Lostris spoke from the wings, her shad-owy alter ego on stage stood over the mummiform figure of Osiris and made a series of mystical gestures. 'My dear brother, by the rare and marvellous powers granted to me by our forefather, Ammon-Ra, I restore to you those manly parts that cruel Seth so brutally tore from you,' intoned my mistress.

I had equipped the mummy case with a device that I could raise by hauling on a length of fine linen twine that ran over a pulley in the temple roof directly above where Osiris lay. At Isis' words the wooden phallus, hinged to the god's pudenda, rose in majestic splendour, as long as my arm, into full erection. The audience gasped with admiration.

When Isis caressed it, I jerked the string to make it leap and twitch. The audience loved it, but loved it even better when the goddess mounted the supine mummy of the god. Judging by the convincing acrobatics of her simulated ecstasy, the harlot I had chosen to play the part must have been one of the truly great exponents of her art. The audience gave full recognition to her superior performance, egging her on with whistling and hooting and shouting ribald advice.