The Age of Ra

12. Aegean

Let me tell you this, Dave. All the advance planning in the world, all the preparation, all the well-formulated tactics, it doesn't amount to a bucket of shit once the fighting starts. That's true of any battle and it's truer than true of naval battles. The moment you and the enemy engage, everything goes to pieces. All you can do is hang in there, keep hammering away at the other guy, and hope there are more of your ships left afloat at the end than there are of his. That's while contending with sea conditions, tides, weather, all of that as well. It's a wonder the admirals even bother with strategy meetings. They might as well sit in a circle wanking each other off for all the difference it makes. They probably do that anyway.

So there we were, three days out of Marseilles, steaming up through the Dodecanese to take on the Nephs, who were harrying merchant shipping all along the east coast of Greece from Thessaloniki to Athens. It was a classic piece of sabre-rattling from them. Things had been pretty quiet on the Mediterranean front for a couple of years and someone high up at Neph Fleet HQ must've got bored and fancied some action. You can bet the Setics were egging them on from the sidelines, too. Moscow in particular had been itching to reopen hostilities in the Med arena. All those battleships docked at Odessa and Sevastopol — couldn't have them sitting there gathering barnacles, now could we? Besides, there's nothing worse than sailors in port with nothing to do. They drink the bars dry, wear out the whores, and start fights. So it was in the Setics' interest if the Nephs stirred it up with us. Then they could come whizzing to the rescue from the Black Sea, bingo, everyone happy.

On the day of the battle itself, I was on Forenoon Watch and eight bells were about to toll. Which means, landlubber, my shift was nearly over and it was coming up to midday. It had been a beautiful morning. I remember telling myself to try and take it all in, how the sky looked, how the sea looked, the smell of the air, because I knew we were likely to encounter the Nephs that day and I mightn't have the chance to enjoy another morning ever again. The sky was sapphire. The sea was purple, choppy, frenetic. We were sailing with a strong southerly bumping us along from behind, so I was inhaling plenty of fumes from the funnel but I didn't mind. Barely noticed. Everywhere on a warship smells of diesel. Your clothes stink of it, your hair. It's a sailor's perfume.

Lovely morning, like I say, and it felt good to be part of a fleet heading towards a battle zone. From my starboard watch post I could see at least half a dozen other ships — a couple of frigates, a destroyer, our fellow dreadnought the Indomitable, and the corvettes that were escorting her and us. Our corvette was the Serapis, and personally I blame her imbecile of a captain for what happened to the Immortal. I mean, his one and only job was to stop a submarine getting a shot off at us, and did he do that? Did he arse!

But until he let us down so grievously, it was comforting to see his ship and the others, all forging along on the same heading at a rate of knots. It really gave me a feeling of invincibility. His Pharaonic Majesty's Mediterranean Fleet in full force, backed up by some French and German cruisers, with a Spaniard or two somewhere in the mix, all of us with our battle ensigns flying. The Hegemony out for blood, happy to take the bait the Nephs had dangled before us, eager to in fact, with Britain of course leading the way as usual, belligerent and bloodthirsty bunch that we are. I thought nothing could beat us. I'd accepted the fact that this could be my last day on earth but I didn't really anticipate that being the case.

Just as the watch was over, a Saqqara Bird came scooting in from the north. The ship's priest had been sitting cross-legged for an hour at the bows, little spot he had there that he liked to occupy while in trance. He stood up, straightening out his cloak and adjusting his gold silk headcloth, and held up his hands to catch the bird. It glided to him and he cradled it in his arms and stroked it like a pet, like it was a real feathered creature and not just a ba-animated piece of carved willow. Priests, I ask you! It's not a profession for a sane person, is it? Some of them are born communing with the gods, in which case they don't start out normal, and the rest learn how to commune with the gods at seminary, in which case they inevitably end up a bit bonkers. Either way, they're doomed to a life of mental wonkiness. Hearing voices, seeing visions — it soon loosens your grip on reality.

Anyway, I could tell that our guy's bird had shown him where the Nephs were while it was out on its scouting mission, because he wasn't looking any too happy. And judging by the way he scurried aft to the bridge to report to the captain, they weren't too far off.

A few minutes after that the battle stations klaxon sounded and everything went crazy. A whole lot of ship-to-ship heliographing went on — no radio communication so that the Nephs couldn't intercept the transmissions — and the fleet closed together in battle formation, becoming this moving wall of armour and firepower, ironclad, unstoppable. Or seemingly unstoppable.

Then they appeared on the horizon, the Nephthysian fleet, coming towards us, another moving wall of armour and firepower. Their smoke hung above them, a long, dark grey stain in the sky. It was the smoke I could see, more than the ships themselves, which were little more than dots. But I could still tell that there were as many of them as there were of us. There seemed to be more, in fact.

By this point I was belowdecks, overseeing the manning of the for'ard guns. But there's a viewplate in the turret just next to the barrels, to help with range-finding and observation, so I could watch from there as we bore down on the Nephs and vice versa. They were well within range of our sixteen-inchers, and us of theirs, when the firing started. Ten thousand yards or less between the two fleets when the ba shells started flying.

The madness of battle…

Well, you must know about it as well as I do, Dave, now that you're a soldier boy. Honestly, who'd have thought it? The Westwynter heirs, both of them joining military service. Never in a million years would anyone have predicted that about us. Least of all you, bro, turning your back on the cushy lifestyle, giving Dad the two fingers and buggering off to the army. Zafirah tells me I'm to blame for that, indirectly. You'll have to tell me more about it later. You want to know what happened to me, so I'll carry on. Here's the rest of the story.

Guns fucking blazing. The turret rocking with each shell that we fired. A boom that was deafening despite ear defenders. A noise so loud it left you feeling dizzy each time. And no other thought, no other purpose in mind, but to lob as many of those shells as you could, as quickly as you could, and pound the bastards over there to bits. Radar and the gunnery obs post telling us what to do, where to aim. Shooting at a foe we could barely see. Men loading charge and projectile, yelling at each other. Gunners calling out their firing solutions. A chaotic machine.

I'd been in skirmishes before aboard Immortal, random encounters with stray Neph craft where the odd shot was exchanged, usually a low-level tit-for-tat zapping with ba bolts, never anything like this, with the big guns in play. The incoming fire was terrific. The sea around us kept exploding in huge white geysers of water, lit from within by ba. I saw, with my own eyes, one of the frigates go up, less than five hundred yards from us. It was there one moment. The next, it was this fragmented thing, barely a ship, more a rough outline of one, aflame, listing over, rolling like a wounded whale.

The initial bombardment lasted an hour all told, and by then we'd got close enough to the enemy for our destroyers to turn broadside and unleash torpedoes. Their torpedo tubes revolved and ripple-fired, while we dreadnoughts kept the artillery salvoes going.

What none of us had any idea of then was that a torpedo was coming our way, courtesy of a Setic sub half a mile to port. The captain of the Serapis had no idea either, though he bloody well should have. He should have been hunting down that sub with his sonar and depth-charging it to oblivion, instead of which he was fannying about doing something, anything, other than what he was fucking supposed to.

It hit us amidships, bang on the aft boiler room. It broke Immortal's keel in two — snapped her spine. It had to have been a fusion-head torpedo, to do that much damage. Red and purple ba uniting, the power of Set and Nephthys coming together, an even more volatile mix than that of Isis and Osiris. Any other kind of torpedo, striking anywhere else, and Immortal might have been able to carry on. The bulkhead seals would have contained the inrushing water and she'd have been reeling but still able to fight, like a punch-drunk boxer. But the engines were blown up, the hull lost integrity… the technical term for her status is ''fucked''.

And so the call came to abandon ship. Horns whooped. Men scarpered for the lifeboats, and believe me, I was scarpering as fast and as frantically as any of them. Disaster drill? Calm and orderly evacuation? Forget it. Everyone was trampling over everyone else to get the fuck out of there, clawing, scrabbling, fighting. Rank meant nothing. We were all of us equals in our terror. We clambered out onto deck, in our lifejackets, and Immortal was shrieking and groaning and shuddering. The whole of her midsection was engulfed in smoke and flames, and she was letting out these bellows of tormented metal, which mingled with the dull thudding detonations of exploding fuel holds.

Then — and this is the truly shit part — I felt the deck start to rise under me at an angle. Everyone around me was finding it hard to keep their balance. Me too. The bow of the ship was coming up out of the water. The stern was as well. Immortal was collapsing in on herself, her two halves bending together in a massive V, and not a single lifeboat had been launched yet, not a single crewman had got safely off her. It was all happening too fast. Suddenly the deck was canted at forty-five degrees and getting steeper, and men started slithering and tumbling down it, heading for the inferno at the crux of the V. I happened to be standing near the anchor capstan and I managed to grab on to it and clung on, but I knew I wasn't going to able to keep hold of it forever. And the ship was starting to sink. No, sink's too gentle a word. She was starting to plummet. This beautiful big boat that I'd come to trust, that I'd come to believe was the sturdiest thing in the world, was going down as swiftly as though something was dragging her below, some leviathan or kraken of myth, wrenching her down into the depths. I hurtled down with her, still clutching that capstan. The surface of the sea below me was boiling white, seething, steaming, with an orange glow deep within, the fuel holds still alight even underwater. I remember wondering whether the water was going to be scalding hot or freezing cold when I hit it, and I remember thinking I probably wouldn't know either way because at this speed the impact was bound to knock me out.

I did lose consciousness, but not quite that way. One moment I was descending. Next, a flash of light and I was flying. I had no idea at the time what was happening, but I've found out since, by reading eyewitness reports. The fire reached one of Immortal's for'ard magazines. Her bow end convulsed in this immense explosion that blew me off my perch and outward, away from the ship. I must have looked like a flea being flung off a shaking dog. I have this dim recollection of weightlessness, of not knowing which way was up or down. It was weirdly pleasant, like a funfair ride. Remember that time we went to the funfair, you and me? With Mrs Plomley. And we went on the waltzer ten times in a row, and at the end I got off and was sick down Mrs Plomley's coat. Felt a bit like that. The waltzer part, not the being sick part.

I have no memory of landing in the water. I have no memory of anything from the next few hours. I came round sometime towards evening. The sky was pink, clouds were swelling overhead, and I was floating in the water, my lifejacket like this constricting puffy collar around my neck. My brain felt fragmented, my thoughts all over the place and I couldn't pull them back together. I couldn't hear anything except the lapping of the water around me, the heave and surge of the sea.

Gradually I began making sense of things, and I listened out for the sound of guns, because I assumed the battle must be going on somewhere within earshot, even if somewhere meant ten miles away. But the battle had moved on. The fleets, the Nephs' and ours, had gone off in one direction and I'd gone off in another, and I was all alone out there on the ocean. Just me, the Aegean, and nothing else. Oh, a couple of corpses bobbing nearby, ratings from the Immortal, but they weren't much for company and we soon went our separate ways. Otherwise, alone.

I became aware of the left side of my face feeling odd. Tight. Stretched. Painful in a dull, tingly kind of way. I tried touching it to find out what was the matter but my fingers were numb. Been in the water so long they'd lost all sensitivity. I guessed I'd struck something or been struck by something, debris perhaps, and my face was swollen and bruised.

Night came. Rain started to fall — great hissing sheets of it. I lay there floating, thinking maybe I should try and make the effort to swim. But swim where? Which way? It would be a waste of energy. If I conserved my strength instead, I might just stay alive that little bit longer. I was probably in a current and the current would be taking me somewhere, maybe to land, maybe further out to sea. Whichever it was, swimming wasn't going to make a gnat's fart of difference. So I just hung there, suspended in the water, the rain rattling down on my head, drumming on the roof of my skull.

I'm not ashamed to admit I bawled like a baby several times during the first part of that night. I was lost and terrified, and the rain was doing what the sea couldn't and half-drowning me. I longed to be home, safe and dry, and see you again, and Mum, and even Dad. I'd have given anything for a chance to be with my family, everyone on good terms with everyone else, all differences set aside, forgiven, forgotten, a clean slate.

The rain stopped around midnight, I'd say. The sky cleared. The stars came out. By that point the pain from my face had faded, I couldn't feel my limbs at all, and I was shivering uncontrollably. Exposure, hypothermia, delayed shock — I knew I was suffering from any or all of them, and I knew, no two ways about it, I was going to die.

But the stars, Dave… I couldn't stop gazing up at them. They were so beautiful and so many. I identified the constellations. Astronomy was about the only lesson I ever paid any attention in at school. I knew all the names, both the old Roman ones and the modern ones. Orion's Belt, for instance, which we now call the Three Pyramids, with the Milky Way representing the Nile. And Draco, a.k.a. the Crocodile. And Leo, the Sphinx. They glittered above me and somehow it was hugely reassuring. Not in any spiritual way, just the fact that there were so many stars up there, so many millions of them. And here was little me down here, on my own, with just hours to live, if that, and the stars were sparing a fraction of their light to create this rich, brilliant display in the heavens, and they were doing it for me, that's how it seemed. I felt I was the only person who was appreciating or had ever appreciated the show they were putting on, and I was determined to enjoy it for as long, or as little, as I had left.

That was when I first began to sense it: the size, the scale, the scope of the universe. Staring up at the stars, I had an inkling of something significant. I'm going to use a Christian term here: epiphany. It's fallen into disuse but it fits better than any other word I can think of. Epiphany.

Our physics teacher, what was his name? Him with the stammer and the lick-and-spit comb-over. Perkins. Mr Perkins. ''Puh-Puh-Puh-Perkins'', as we used to call him. To his face. Fuck, we were cruel. He once said that the universe isn't just big, it's infinite. There's no measuring it. There's no way of quantifying everything it contains. You just have to accept that it goes on forever and is mostly full of nothing.

''A buh-buh-buh-bit like your head, Westwynter Minor,'' he added. The old wuh-wuh-wisecracker.

But it didn't seem empty to me then, the universe. Quite the opposite. It was full. Jam-packed with stars, and each of those stars a sun like our own. And our sun is Ra, we all know that. Science tells us it's a gigantic ball of burning matter, an explosion in the sky. But it's also a physical manifestation of Ra's essence. His ba suffuses it and makes it shine. Without him animating it, the sun would cease to be. That's what we know. That's what we're led to believe. Those are reconciled facts.

But what about all those other stars? Is there a Ra for each of them?

If so, then our Ra is only one of an uncountable number of other supreme deities.

If not, then Ra is just a single supreme deity in one remote corner of a vast, unending nothingness.

Meaning, one way or the other, Ra is less than we think. Far less.

He is, in fact, insignificant, and so by definition are all his descendants.

Those were my thoughts. It was barely an idea, more the preliminary sketch for an idea. But still it struck me as being profound and extraordinarily powerful.

Not that I stood to gain anything by it. What use is enlightenment when your life is zooming to a close?

The stars wheeled giddyingly, and I blacked out.

When I came to, I was on a beach. It was morning. The sun was hot on my back. I had sand up my nose and I was being bitten all over by sand flies.

I wobbled upright. My face, the left side of it, was agony. I felt sick and thirsty. I had a headache like you wouldn't believe, a right royal brain-splitter. I've never been in worse shape.

But — ecstasy.

I was alive.

I was fucking well alive!

Turned out I'd washed up on one of the hundreds of islands that dot that part of the Aegean. It was a tiny knob of land jutting up from the sea, probably smaller in surface area than Courtdene, which is, what, the whole estate, a hundred acres? You could have walked around its perimeter in less than an hour, not that that was possible. Most of the shoreline was steep, jagged rocks forming coves and crags, especially on the windward side. It had one sandy beach, though, the one I'd woken up on, and a couple of pebbly ones.

It also had wild olive groves. And a freshwater stream that ran down in a series of falls and eddying pools. And a colony of rabbits. And a small, smooth-floored cave.

It had, in other words, everything a person could need in order to survive. Food. Water. Shelter.

And survive is what I did on that island, for the best part of six weeks. It was the most remarkable stroke of good fortune winding up where I did, and I took full advantage of it. I'd been as good as dead, and now through some fluke of wind and tide I found myself in a place with enough in the way of natural resources for a subsistence level of living. How had the olive trees come to grow there? Seeds carried by birds or the ocean currents, I suppose. Where had the rabbits come from? Perhaps a pet, a pregnant doe, had survived a shipwreck. Or perhaps it was simply the case that once in the dim and distant past the island had had human inhabitants and the olives and the rabbits were their legacy. I didn't know. I don't know. I didn't want to probe the matter too deeply, either. I was scared that if I started questioning the origin of these amenities, they might just, you know, vanish in a puff of smoke. Gift-horses and mouths and all that.

Six weeks of Robinson Crusoe, and I won't pretend it wasn't hard. The worst of it was my face. I'd figured out that it had got burnt, scorched when Immortal's bow end blew up. I couldn't tell how badly, though. I had no mirror, and the stream and the sea weren't able to provide a smooth enough reflection to check. My fingers explored blisters and wet sore patches and could feel the heat of inflammation, not to mention scrubby bits on my scalp where the hair was gone, but unless you can actually see your injuries for yourself, it's hard to know the full extent of them. It's all a bit hypothetical. I imagined terrible scarring and equally I imagined mild singeing. The only treatment I could think of was bathing the affected area in salt water, so day after day, every couple of hours or so, I'd kneel in the shallows and rinse my face. Never pleasant. Fucking horrible, in fact. But it began to do the trick. Gradually it hurt less each time. The inflammation went down. The sores healed up. But the damage had been done and was, I knew, permanent.

Catching and eating the rabbits wasn't much of a problem. The buggers were as tame as anything. They'd lived there for generations without a natural predator, so they would come lolloping up to me when I approached, more or less ready to sniff my hand. Then — grab, hold, twist, snap neck. Easy peasy. And they never learned, the stupid things. Never got wise. Every time I went up to their warren, another bunny would hop trustingly forward and offer itself as lunch.

I'd skin 'em and gut 'em with a sharp stone, then lay the meat out on a rock to cure in the sun. It wasn't delicious but it wasn't the worst meal I'd had either. Ship's food could be a damn sight less tasty.

And olives; never my favourite vegetable, or is it fruit? But they were edible and filled a hole. Mind you, after a steady diet of them for six weeks I never want to touch one again as long as I live.

It was bearable, though, that was the thing. I knew I could stick it out, this whole ordeal, because I was convinced I was going to be found and rescued. I never had any doubt about that. It wasn't as though I was stuck on a coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific, after all. I was on an island in the Aegean, in one of the busiest parts of the Aegean what's more, an area laced with shipping lanes. Time and again I saw ships pass by, freighters, tankers, ferries, too far away to spot me, certainly too far away to be hailed, not that that stopped me from trying or from feeling crushed and despondent when they steamed on out of sight. But I remained sure that it was only a matter of time before one of them sailed close enough and I was seen and picked up. The odds were in my favour. All I had to do was sit tight and wait.

In the end a rescuer didn't just pass nearby. He landed virtually on my doorstep.

His name was Iannis, and he was a smuggler, and he owned a small but surprisingly nippy fishing boat which he'd inherited from his father and used to run drugs between Europe and North Africa. Normally he did this without much interference. He'd dart back and forth across the Med and the authorities on both sides were mostly preoccupied with other things, too busy keeping an eye on the enemy's manoeuvres to worry about one little boat and its comings and goings. Sometimes, though, he did fall foul of the coastguard and either had to bribe his way out of trouble or else make a run for it and lie low for a while till the heat died down.

My island was one of Iannis's boltholes. It was also a handy stopover, a secluded spot where he could put in for the night to break up the journey.

I was fast asleep when he anchored at my beach late one evening. I woke up in the morning, left my cave, strode down the sand… and bugger me, there was this boat sitting there, and this middle-aged man in a string vest standing on deck taking a leak over the side.

He stared at me. I stared at him. To his credit, he didn't stop peeing. Me, I'd have been so startled my flow would have seized up. I mean, it must have been quite a sight, some scrawny fellow in a ragged sailor's outfit, looking half-crazed, with an injured face and some clumps of hair missing, growing back as stubble. Me, tottering towards him out of the blue, on an island where he had every right to believe he was perfectly alone. But Iannis, he just kept on pissing till he was done, then tucked himself away and buttoned up, still staring at me, surprised but somehow managing to stay casual, as if he'd had far stranger encounters than this in his lifetime.

Then he asked me, in English, if I was English. I said yes, how could you tell? He said it was the uniform. Royal Navy. A midshipman, judging by the jacket cuffs. And then he said the thing that told me I was going to be all right with him. He said, ''Also known as a 'snotty'.''

I laughed. ''That's the nickname for my rank. How'd you know?''

Iannis gave a hefty, big-shouldered shrug. ''I know many information. Fifty years I am sailing these seas, since a boy. All that time, war. Navies, uniforms, nicknames — I pick up all these things and have them in the memory, here.'' He tapped his grizzled head. ''Languages too. I speak many very good, some not so good.''

I didn't ask which of those categories he put his English in. That's exactly how he sounded, by the way. I know you think I'm crap at accents, Dave, but really, I've nailed Iannis's. Look sceptical if you want. Suit yourself.

Point is, he was basically a decent bloke, and he could tell my whole sorry story just by looking at me, and he knew he wasn't going to leave me there on that island, and I knew it too by the way he'd spoken. So it wasn't long before I was on board his boat and we were putt-putting out to sea and I was enjoying a swig of paint-stripper whisky and feeling relieved and redeemed and about as happy as a man can hope to be.

Iannis told me he was heading to Tangiers, ''on business'', but he could drop me off at Gibraltar on the way if I didn't mind. Did I mind? How could I mind! He also said he'd try and find a doctor to take a look at my — he didn't say what. Just circled a finger around one side of his face and looked sorry and grim.

Later, I found a shaving mirror in the cabin below and had a squint at myself…

I don't want to talk about it. Not now. All I'll say is, it wasn't terrible scarring and it wasn't mild singeing either. If one's ten and the other's zero, then let's rate the damage a seven. Really, I don't want to talk about it any more than that. Maybe some other time.

So south-west towards Morocco we went. It didn't take me long to work out that Iannis's ''business'' was less than legit. For starters, he was piloting a fishing boat that wasn't doing any fishing. The nets were bone dry and new-looking, like they'd never even been in the water. But also, whenever he spotted any other vessel, no matter what sort of boat it was he'd change course and steer clear. And then there was the little matter of the secret cargo hold I accidentally discovered, with an access hatch hidden beneath a section of false floor in the head. It was a crawlspace that ran nearly the entire length of the boat, well caulked and dry, empty but smelling strongly of hashish. I didn't mention finding it but Iannis knew I had because I'd failed to lay the floor section back quite as snugly as I should. He produced a pistol and told me that as I'd uncovered his secret he was going to have to shoot me and toss me overboard. I said there was no need for that. I didn't care how he chose to make a living. I admitted I was fond of a bit of dope myself, and added that I'd been something of a smuggler myself at school, which is true as we both know. He could shoot me if he wanted, I went on, but he'd surely be better off taking me on as a deckhand instead. With me assisting him, he could do his runs in half the time because he wouldn't have to stop for rests. We'd take the helm in shifts, travel through the night, and he could do twice as much business but I would only ask for a quarter of his profits. Ergo, he stood to gain half as much money again as he was making now, for the same amount of effort.

The maths impressed him. Next thing I knew, the pistol had been put away, the whisky was out, and we sealed the deal by getting roaring drunk.

Iannis was as good as his word. He got me to a doctor in Gibraltar, who didn't speak a word of English but had a face that was as expressive of his diagnosis as any words could be, if not more so. Essentially, there was nothing senor mEdico could do for me except give me some kind of salve that might have helped had I had it six weeks earlier. He suggested plastic surgery but didn't hold out much hope of success. At least now I know the Spanish for ''disfigured'': desfigurado.

For the next year, Iannis and I plied our not-so-reputable trade up and down the Med, the old Greek seadog and his English seapup sidekick. I can't deny it was fun. We had our fair share of scrapes, of course. Fired on by coastguards outside Naples. Rammed by rival drug runners off Malta. Not to mention the time we strayed into a mine-seeded zone not far from Tunis harbour. My fault, that one. Didn't read the charts properly. Hairiest half-hour of my life as Iannis gentled the boat around and back while I leaned over the bows peering into the water for those huge conker shapes. We actually nudged one of them with our hull, though somehow it didn't go off. It was clean underpants time afterwards, as you can imagine.

We became firm pals, the two of us. And I know what you're thinking. A Greek sailor, and lithe, well-muscled young me. Well, belay that foul thought, big brother. It wasn't like that. None of that sort of thing went on, no hanky-panky belowdecks. Mostly what we did in our spare time was get blisteringly blotto together. Whisky was our preferred tipple, but Iannis got me onto retsina too. Here's an interesting fact about retsina: it tastes the same coming back up as it does going down. I experienced that more times than I care to remember.

All that time, I was thinking hard about the insight I'd had while floating in the sea that night. I'd talk about it with Iannis now and again. He was a great one for the deep and meaningful discussion. The deep and meaningful discussion with an ever-emptying bottle in your hand.

Iannis liked to hark back to the days of the ''old religion'' in Greece, and I don't mean Orthodox Christianity. Before that. The days of the Olympian pantheon, Zeus and all his relatives and cronies.

''Gods who were like us,'' he said. ''Gods you can understand. Fighting, fucking, falling over, fouling up. Zeus, always being caught with the pants down. Dionysus, never sober. The Furies, hounding the men, driving them mad. I have known many women like that, it's true. I even married with one, for too many years. Gods you feel you could sit down, have chitchat with. They would be interested in you, like you in them. They never left the people alone, always making mess in lives. But because they wanted to be with us. They liked humans. This lot, the One True Pantheon. Pfah!''

Imagine someone spitting at their feet here.

''They use us, that's all. What is the saying? A means to an end. For getting the own back on each other. They have no respect for us, even though we keep them going. Without worship from us they are nothing. And do they thank us? Do they even notice us any more?''

His conclusion was always this. Somebody should take a stand against them. Somebody should show them the contempt they show us. See how they like it.

''Freegypt,'' he'd say. ''If only the whole of the world was like Freegypt.''

He didn't mean at war with itself. In that respect the whole world was like Freegypt. He meant, simply, independent of the gods. Freegypt might be troubled but at least its troubles were of its own making. Secular troubles.

We often stopped off at Freegypt on our travels. Nothing I saw of the place made me think here was some humanist paradise. Alexandria, Port Said, El Alamein — I found them to be typically fly-ridden North African seaports, where baksheesh for the harbourmaster meant you could get away with loading or offloading just about anything, if you were reasonably discreet. No one there looked to me any happier or more enlightened than anywhere else. Not even the foreign apostates who'd come from abroad seeking a life without theocracy. They just seemed kind of disappointed, as if they'd been expecting more. This wasn't the promised land, just another fucking fucked-up country. The dockers were lazy, the hookers surly, the sailors ready to stick a knife between your ribs as soon as look at you… The main difference I did notice was the absence of hieroglyphics. All signage came in Arabic, or sometimes Arabic and English. Officials didn't have cartouches on their uniforms telling you who they worked for and how important they were. But apart from that, Freegypt never struck me as being particularly, well, free.

But there was something there, I thought. If Iannis was right — and I was more and more sure that he was — and somebody had to make a stand against the gods, Freegypt was where to do it. It was the place to start.

And I was the man for the job.

Destiny calling. A year, almost to the day, after I met Iannis, we parted ways. The big old fellow hugged me and blubbed like a baby. Told me losing me was like losing the son he'd never had. I didn't point out that you can't lose a son you've never had. Truth be told, I was a little choked up and teary myself. We'd had some great times together. But I'd found something more important to do now. Iannis understood. He gave me some extra money, on top of the money I already had, the drug earnings I'd carefully saved up and hardly spent any of.

''For the doing of good work,'' he told me. ''To free the world.''

I stood on the dockside at Port Said and watched his boat chunter off into the distance, till it was lost in the sparkle of the sea.

Then I turned and went south.

A disfigured white man in an Arabic country wasn't going to get far unless he learned the local lingo. So first thing I did was get a job with a private English-language school in Cairo, which I managed without having a passport or any form of ID, let alone a qualification. The school head was as open to unsolicited cash windfalls as anyone. In theory I was teaching middle-class Freegyptian kids to speak English. In practice, I was doing my best to pick up their tongue. I struggled with the glottal stops and the long consonants and the superheavy syllables, but I got there in the end. In fact I've been told my ''teachers'' succeeded too well. Zafirah says my Arabic is horribly slangy. I slur and elide like a slack-jawed teenager. But I like to think that gives me the demotic touch, which I'd never have back home, say, speaking with this posh accent of mine, dontcha know, toodle-pip, what-what.

Then, once I was conversational in Arabic, if not quite fluent, I headed down to Luxor, because here was where the infighting was at its worst. When you set out to cure a disease, you don't bother yourself with the secondary symptoms. You go straight to the source of the problem, and Luxor was it, a festering wound in Freegypt's gut.

I realised something right away. Basically, all that the factions who were slugging away at one another wanted was to be top dog. Each of them had no aim other than that, to rule the region and be boss. It sounds obvious, but in all the confusion they themselves seemed to have forgotten the causes they'd started fighting for all the decades ago. Now it was just rhetoric and entrenched positions, with motive and logic long lost. It was gang mentality. Each side knew all the others were their enemies and wanted to beat them, and that was it.

A go-between was needed. Someone non-aligned. Someone who could mediate among the factions and show them that there was a greater prize available to them than just crushing their foes.

That was how the Lightbringer came into being. My alter ego. The jumpsuit — it was straightforward, non-threatening, mundane. The gloves? So my lily-white hands wouldn't show. And the mask… well, I settled on that so that my desfigurado fizzog wouldn't put anyone off and also so that I wouldn't be just some meddling foreigner, a European colonialist coming and telling everyone else what to do. They'd had enough of that back in Victorian times, when the map of Egypt was British imperial red. The mask anonymised me. Is that a word, anonymised? It should be. Effaced me. Made me distinctive and at the same time less distinct.

It took ten months — ten long months of bloody hard slog. I convinced the Liberators to give me a chance first of all. The lovely Zafirah helped out there. She put her trust in me almost before anyone else did. And once I had the Liberators in the bag, I used their ground-knowledge and their strategic resources to get to the enemy camps and win hearts and minds there as well. Not easy. I've lost count of the number of times I wound up kneeling with a gun to my head and some sweaty guerrilla commander yelling at me that he was going to blow my brains out, and all I could do was talk and keep talking and pray that no one ripped my mask off and saw the mangled face underneath. Which did happen a couple of times, as a matter of fact, and luckily the result worked in my favour. Everyone was so startled by what they saw, they stopped and heard me out.

What I was offering them was both less and more. Less in terms of tangible military conquest, more in terms of status. I was offering them a new ideology to replace the ones they'd pretty much allowed to lapse. I was telling these local warlords that they could continue fighting over Upper Freegypt and maybe one day end up with a slightly larger chunk of land to call their own, but never the whole region. That was not going to happen. It had been stalemate here for a century. How was that likely to change? Or they could break the cycle and start afresh.

You'd be surprised how well the message went down. I know I was. Seems there was a real appetite for an end to the hostilities, or else the paramilitaries had had their fill of relentless, grinding conflict and couldn't stomach any more. They were tired of killing their own countrymen, but none of them wanted to be the first to say ''enough''. None of them had the nerve to raise the white flag and tender the olive branch. Their leaders couldn't afford to do that, as a matter of pride, until I came along and presented them with a dignified, face-saving excuse. Throwing in their lot with the Lightbringer wasn't a climb-down. It was the opposite, a way up and out of the morass of partisanship they'd become bogged down in.

The day came when there was a big powwow between me and every one of the faction leaders, just us sitting down in a room to seal our alliance once and for all. All of them knew by then that I was a displaced Englishman with complexion issues, and they had got past it. It didn't matter to them. I kept the mask on anyway at all times, because I knew it was helping to build a mystique around me. Across the region the Lightbringer was becoming this strange, not quite human figure, unknowable, a little monstrous perhaps, someone people talked about in slightly disbelieving whispers, an object of speculation and wondering, and that all served to foster my reputation and further my cause.

But in that room, as we formally agreed to work together as a united force of Upper Freegyptians, it gradually became clear that the faction leaders were deferring to me. They kept looking to me to confirm or disagree with whatever they said. I realised that I was making all the running, setting the tone, and they were happily going along with it. When we got up from the table it was bear hugs and handclasps all round, and I could tell that quite without meaning to or trying to, I'd taken charge. I was the big shot now. I was top dog. There'd not been any election, any show of hands. I hadn't had to arm-wrestle a rival into submission or kill one of them just to show the others I meant business. By unspoken consent all the warlords had deferred to me. They seemed only too happy to pass the burden of command on to someone else. They were waiting for me to tell them what to do next. So I told them.

''We start training our men, together. We instil them with discipline. We forge them into a unit, a single army. And we gather weapons. As much as we can. Every type that we can.''

That was three years ago. And here we are now.