The Sunbird

‘Ben, what is it? You’re bleeding!’

‘Where is Lo?’ It was desperately urgent. I had to find him. He had been exposed to the fungus also. I had to find him.

Sally looked down at the bed beside her. There was the indentation on the pillow where Louren’s head had lain.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, big-eyed, puzzled. ‘He was here. He must have gone out.’

I coughed, great choking sobs, and felt fresh blood in my mouth. Sally was fully awake now. She stared at me.

‘Ben, what is it?’

‘Neuromyces,’ I told her, and she gasped seeing the blood streaming down my chin.

‘Louren and I have opened a secret passage beyond the sun image in the archives. It’s infected with the spores. We took no precautions. It has got us. I’m sure he’s there now. I’m going to him.’ I stopped to breathe. Sally was out of bed slipping into her gown, coming to me.

‘Get Ral Davidson. Respirators. Take all precautions. Follow us. I will prop the doors open. Down steps. Turn left at bottom. Follow us. Louren will have it also, drives you mad. Crazy. Terrible things. Come quickly - do you understand?’

‘Yes, Ben.’

‘Get Ral,’ I said and turned. I ran out into the smoke and flames and darkness, running for the cliffs and the cavern. The great walls of the temple towered above me, walls long gone. The great phallic towers of Baal pointed to the moon, lit by the flames of a burning city. Towers that stood again after so long. They were screaming, the women, burning alive with their children. Dead men lay strewn in my path, cut down like the harvest of the devil, their dead faces terrible in the moonlight.

‘Louren,’ I shouted and ran on through the temple. They were in my path, dark and savage, crowding forward to oppose me. Dark, shapeless, terrifying, and I flew at them with a strange battle cry yelled from a blood-glutted throat. The mighty axe spun its silver circles in the firelight, and I was through them, running.

I reached the cavern, saw it lit by the guttering torches, saw the pavement of stone bordering the circular green beauty of the emerald pool. The rows of stone benches, rising in tiers around it as they had 2,000 years before. With a last enormous effort of will, I forced my brain to discount this fantasy and to recognize reality.

The wooden guard hut stood across the cavern from me. I staggered towards it. The guard sat at his desk reading. He looked up, his expression changing to surprise and incredulity.

‘Good God, are you all right, Doctor?’

‘Mr Sturvesant, is he in the tunnel?’

‘Yes.’

‘When did he go in?’

‘An hour ago.’ The guard came towards me. ‘Is something wrong? You are bleeding, Doctor!’

‘Wait here,’ I told him. ‘The others are coming. They know what do to.’

I hurried on into the archives, smelling the smoke still and hearing the clamour of a dying city ring in my ears.

Before the image of the sun-god I let the great battle-axe slip from my hand and left it lying on the stone floor. I pushed the stone door open, and propped it with one of the war shields to prevent it swinging closed behind me.

I ran down the staircase. Halfway down I saw the glow of light from the tomb below.

The inscribed doorway with its graven curse of the gods stood open, jammed in the hinge by the cable of the arc-light. The light lay on its side in the centre of the tomb where Louren had dropped it. The bulb still burned, lighting the tomb vividly.

Louren lay on his back at the foot of the huge granite sarcophagus of Lannon Hycanus, the last king of Opet.

He was naked to the waist. His face was deathly pale, his eyes closed, and bright blood stained the corners of his mouth and ran back down his cheeks into his ears and hair.

With the last of my strength I staggered to where he lay and dropped onto my knees beside him. I stooped over him and tried to lift him, my arms around his shoulders.

His skin was moist and burning hot, and his head flopped helplessly backwards. A new bright gush of blood ran out of his mouth, wetting my hands.

‘Louren,’ I cried, holding him to my chest. ‘Oh please, God, help me! Help me!’

There was still life in him, just the last flicker of it. He opened his eyes, those pale blue eyes with the first shadows of death darkening them.

‘Ben,’ he whispered, choking with his own blood. He coughed, spattering droplets of the bright lung blood.

‘Ben,’ he whispered so softly I could scarcely hear it. ‘All the way?’

‘All the way, Lo.’ I whispered, holding him like a sleepy child. His head of golden curls cradled against my shoulder. He was quiet for a little while, then suddenly he stirred again, and when he spoke it was in a clear strong voice.

‘Fly!’ he said. ‘Fly for me, bird of the sun.’ And the life went out of him, he turned to nothing in my arms, the great wild spirit flown - gone.

I knelt over him, feeling my own senses reel. The world turned and swung beneath me. I slipped over the edge of it, down into the swirling darkness of time. Down into a kind of death, a kind of life, for in my dying I dreamed a dream. In my poisoned sleep of death which lasted a moment and a million years I dreamed of long-dead men in a time long passed…

Part II

Of the thirty days of the prophecy there were but two remaining when Lannon Hycanus and his train came at last to the Bay of the Little Fish on the farthest southerly shores of the great lake. It was already dark when ten ships of the fleet anchored in the shallow waters of the bay, and their torches and lamps smeared long ruddy paths of light across the black waters.

Lannon stood beside the wooden gunwale of his steering-deck, and looked out across the fields of papyrus and hidden waterways to the south where the open country began and spread away endlessly into the unknown. He knew that here lay his destiny and that of the nation. For twenty-eight days he had hunted and now he felt an unaccustomed chill of fear fan his arms and neck, fear not of the terrible animal he had come to find, but of the consequences of the animal continuing to evade him.

Behind him there were light footsteps on the wooden deck and Lannon turned quickly. His hand on the hilt of the dagger beneath his leather cloak relaxed as he saw the unmistakable shape of the man in the light of the torches.

‘Huy,’ he greeted him.

‘Highness, you must eat now and sleep.’

‘Have they come yet?’

‘Not yet, but they will before morning,’ replied the hunchback, moving closer to his prince. ‘Come now. You will have need of a steady hand and clear eye on the morrow.’

‘Sometimes it seems I have ten wives, not nine,’ laughed Lannon, and regretted the jest when he saw the blood darken the face of the hunchback; quickly he went on. ‘You pamper me, old friend, but I think that tonight I will hunt sleep with as little success as I have hunted the gry-lion these twenty-eight days since my father’s funeral.’ He turned back to the bridge tail and looked across at the other nine ships. The ships of the nine families, come to watch him make good his claim to the throne of Opet and the four kingdoms, come to watch him take his gry-lion.

‘Look at them, Huy.’ And his friend came to his side. ‘How many of them have made sacrifices to the gods for my failure?’

‘Three of them, certainly - you know which I mean. There are perhaps more of them.’

‘And those who are loyal to house Barca, those we can count upon without question?’

‘You know them also, my lord. Habbakuk Lal will stand with you until the seas turn to sand, house Amon, house Hasmon—’

‘Yes,’ Lannon interrupted. ‘I know them, Huy, every one of them, for and against. I was but talking to have the comfort of your voice.’ He touched the hunchback’s shoulder in a gesture of affection, before turning away to gaze once more into the southern wilderness.

‘When the prophecy was made did they ever foresee the day when the great gry-lion would pass from the land? When a prince might search for all thirty of the days allotted to the task without seeing even the marks of the beasts’ paws in the earth of Opet?’ Lannon spoke with sudden anger. He flung his cloak back over his shoulder and folded his arms across his naked chest. His skin was freshly oiled and the muscles glowed in the torch light, he kneaded his own flesh with the long powerful fingers.

‘My father killed on the twenty-fifth day, and that was forty-six years ago. They said even then that the gry-lion was finished. Since then how many have the scouts reported?’

‘My Lord, the gods will decide,’ Huy tried to soothe him.

‘We have hunted every covert where the gry-lion has been seen in the last 200 years. Five full legions have swept the swamps in the north, three more along the great river.’ He broke off and began pacing the deck, pausing to look down into the hull where the tiers of naked slaves slept chained upon their benches, leaning on the mighty oars in the position in which they would die. The stench of the rowing decks came up to him as a solid thing in the humid night. He turned back to Huy.

‘This reach of the swamps is the last place in the whole of my kingdoms which might hide a gry-lion. If it does not, then what will happen, Huy? Is there no other way in which I might prove my right? Is there no escape in the scrolls?’

‘None, my lord.’ Huy shook his head with regret.

‘The kingship must fall?’

‘Unless there is a gry-lion taken then Opet will have no king.’

‘Who will rule without a king?’

‘The Council of Nine, alone.’

‘And the royal house? What will become of house Barca?’

‘Let us not talk of it,’ Huy suggested softly. ‘Come, my lord. A slave is preparing a jug of hot spiced wine and a stew of fish. The wine will help you to sleep.’

‘Will you make an oracle for tomorrow, my priest of Baal?’ Lannon asked suddenly.

‘If the oracle is unfavourable, will it help you sleep?’ asked Huy, and Lannon stared at him a moment before barking with harsh laughter.

‘You are right, as always. Come then, I am hungry.’

Lannon ate with vast appetite from the bowl of fish, sitting naked on his fur-covered bed. He had let his hair loose and it hung to his shoulders, curling and gleaming strangely golden in the light of the hanging lamp. He was a god-like figure among his dark-haired people.

The leather awnings were opened, and a light breeze came tip from the south-east to cool the cabin and blow out the galley stench. The ship moved to the breeze and the light chop of the surface, her timber popped and creaked softly, a slave cried out in nightmare, and from the deck above came the steps of the night guard - all the familiar comforting sounds of the flagship at sea.

Lannon wiped out the bowl with a piece of millet bread, popped it into his mouth, and washed it down with the last of the wine. He sighed with content, and smiled at Huy.

‘Sing for me, my bird of the sun.’

Huy Ben-Amon squatted on the deck at the foot of the prince’s bed. He held his lute in his lap, and crouched over it.

The curve of his back exaggerated the attitude, the long tar-black tresses of hair hung forward to hide his face, his massively developed arms seemed too powerful for the long delicate fingers that held the lute. He struck a note, and a listening hush fell upon the night. The footsteps overhead ceased, two slave girls ceased their work and came to kneel beside Lannon’s bed, the arguing voices from the ship anchored alongside quieted, and Huy sang.

His voice rang sweetly across the dark waters, and the prince and the fleet listened. Dark shapes moved to the rails; of the nearest ships and stood quietly there looking across at the flagship. On the cheeks of one of the pretty slave girls stood tear-drops that glistened in the lamp light, when Huy sang of a lost love. Then she smiled through her tears when Huy changed the song to one of the bawdy marching tunes of the Sixth Legion.

‘Enough. Huy looked up from his lute at last, ’There will be work tomorrow, my lord.‘

Lannon nodded and touched one of the slave girls on the cheek. Immediately she stood up and loosed the shoulder strap of her linen tunic, letting it fall from her body. She was young and lithe, her body almost boyishly slim in the lamp light. She stooped and gathered her robe, dropped it across the bench beside the door and stepped naked into Lannon’s bed. The other girl went to snuff the lamp, and Huy rose from the deck with his lute slung on his shoulder.

A voice hailed from the darkness, a great bull bellow from the edge of the papyrus beds that carried across the water to the flagship.

‘Open your lines for a friend!’

‘Who calls himself friend?’ One of the guards shouted a challenge, and the reply was bellowed hoarsely.

‘Mursil, huntmaster of house Barca.’ And Lannon was out of his bed in one bound.

‘He has come!’ he exclaimed, flinging his cloak over his shoulders and hurrying to the companion ladder with Huy scampering beside him.

A small canoe bumped alongside and Mursil came up through the entry-port as Lannon and Huy reached the deck, a huge figure, gross and apelike with his big beefy round face ruddy from sun and wine.

The ship was awake now. Her officers swarming up onto the deck, new torches flaring to light the scene as day, the bustle and hum of excitement affecting them all.

Mursil saw Lannon and hurried to him down the aisle which opened for him across the crowded deck. He was followed closely by a pygmy figure, a tiny brown naked manikin that looked about him from slanted eyes in obvious terror at these unfamiliar surroundings.

‘My lord.’ Mursil opened his cloak and dropped heavily to one knee in front of Lannon. ‘I bring good news.’

‘Then you are welcome.’

‘This one,’ Mursil reached behind him and dragged the little bushman forward, ‘this one has found what we seek.’

‘You have seen it?’ Lannon demanded.

‘The tracks of his paws only, but this one has seen the beast itself.’

‘If it is true, you will be well rewarded, both of you,’ promised Lannon Hycanus and turned to grin triumphantly at Huy.

‘The gods have decided. House Barca will have its chance once more.’

The sky was only a shade lighter than the black brooding swampland, the dawn-flighting duck ghost-whistled unseen overhead and each minute the light strengthened.

Half a mile out on the open plain a herd of buffalo grazed in a dark bunch. Heads down, tails swinging lazily, they moved back steadily towards the tall dense banks of papyrus reed.

They moved faster as the light strengthened, hurrying to reach the sanctuary of the reed-beds, 200 huge bovine shapes with their armoured heads and bunched black shoulders. Dawn’s first light showed the white tick birds which hovered above the dark herd in a cold pink sheen. The swampy earth smoked with mist and the endless banks of papyrus stood frozen in the hush of dawn, for once their fluffy white heads were not nodding and dancing - except where something moved amongst the reeds.

Following its track the papyrus heads stirred, an opening and closing movement that set them nodding briefly before settling into stillness once more. The movement was sedate and yet so weighty that it betrayed the size of the animal which stalked beneath it.

The big bull buffalo that led the herd, stopped suddenly fifty yards from the edge of the papyrus bed. He lifted his nose high and spread his ears wide beneath the heavy boss of horn. With little suspicious piggy eyes he examined the bed of reeds ahead of him. Behind him the herd stopped also, alerted by his stillness.

The gry-lion came out of the reeds at full charge, a blur of soft roan-brown, an animal as tall and almost as heavy as the quarry it hunted. It crossed the open ground so swiftly that the bull had only begun to turn away before the gry-lion was on him.

It landed on his back, curved yellow claws hooked through thick black skin and flesh at shoulder and haunch. The long fangs sank into the back of the buffalo’s neck, holding it steady while one paw reached forward and grasped the bull’s nose. A single powerful wrench twisted the black neck back against the holding fangs, the spine snapped with a sharp report and the bull folded in full run.

Before he went down the gry-lion had left him, dropping lightly to the ground, seeming hardly to touch it before he was in the air again, a long arcing leap, flashing soft brown against the pink dawn sky to land easily across the back of an old black cow that ran beside the bull.

Lightly as a humming bird flashing from flower to flower, the gry-lion had killed again. Bone breaking sharply in the dawn, the victim carrying the great lion forward in the press of galloping buffalo, and as the cow died the gry-lion was gone, flitting to the next, killing again in one fleeting movement and flitting again.

Six times the gry-lion killed before the surging, plunging, panicking herd had run 300 paces. Then he let them run, the thunder of their hooves dwindled, a far bank of papyrus swallowed them and they were gone.

The gry-lion stood in the silky light of dawn. His long, black-tufted tail still slashed from side to side with the thrill of the hunt. Every muscle was tight and swollen and the great beast half crouched, the flat snakelike head lifted as though to counter the weight of those long white fangs that curved down almost to touch the fluffy fur of his chest.

The face mask was elaborately patterned in black and startling white, an effect that enhanced the golden glowing savagery in the wide-set eyes, but the whiskers and eyelashes were long white bristle, and seemed to soften the animal’s expression. However, when it stood up from its crouch, with the short ruff of mulberry-brown mane along its back still fully erect, any illusion of softness vanished.

As tall as a man, and as heavy as a horse, armed with those legendary fangs and claws, this was the most dangerous cat that all nature’s twists and evolutions had ever produced.

The cat turned and paced back to where its last victim lay in the short grass of the plain. It stood over the dead buffalo, and it seemed impossible that such a large animal could move as swiftly as this one had at the height of the hunt.

The gry-lion lifted its head, the massive jaws parted, the long pink tongue curled out between those unbelievable fangs, and it roared.

It was a sound that seemed to shake the purple skies of dawn, that made the earth shudder and ruffled the quiet waters of the great lake.

In the dawn, upon the narrow muddy beach beside the reed banks, Huy Ben-Amon greeted his god. Huy wore light hunting armour of leather, a leather breastplate and arm-guards over a short linen tunic and bronze-studded leather kilt, but his weapons were laid aside, for he was about to offer the sacrifice, to send a messenger to great Baal. A messenger to carry the request of Lannon Hycanus to his god. The prince and his nobles were gathered in a half circle about the priest, all of them facing the eastern sky. Baal showed the tip of his fiery orb above the horizon, and they lifted their hands to him. Fingers spread in the sun-sign.

‘Great Baal,’ Huy called the greeting in sweet shimmering tones that seemed must carry to the sky. ‘Your children greet you!’ Huy’s swarthy, beak-nosed features were lit by a mystic glow which gave him a strange beauty.

‘We have come to this place to choose a king for your people and we ask your blessing on our endeavours.’ Huy knew his gods intimately, and though he loved them yet he knew their all too human weaknesses. They were vain, inconsistent, touchy, greedy and sometimes bone-lazy. They must be flattered and cajoled, bribed and jollied along, they needed special ceremony and display to capture their jaded interest and attention, sacrifice, which Huy personally found revolting, to assuage their lust for warm blood. It was not enough that sacrifice was made, it must be made in all the correct forms before the gods would accept it, and as one of his lesser priests led the white bull forward Huy wondered if he had done the right thing in persuading Lannon to offer an animal rather than a slave. The gods preferred human blood, but Huy had argued with Lannon that a bull now and the promise of a slave later might be more effective. Huy had no compunction in bargaining with the great immortals, especially if it delayed the moment when he must look into the terrified, pleading eyes of a doomed slave. In the five years that Huy had directed the religious life of Opet, not more than 100 human messengers had been sent to the gods. Whereas there had been times in the city’s history when that number had been sent at a single ceremony.

‘We send you a fine white bull to carry our message.’ Huy turned and approached the animal. It was of the short stocky Opet type, white and grey dappled, with a fat hump on its shoulders and wide straight horns. It stood quietly as Huy took the vulture axe from one of his priests. The circle of nobles drew back a little, giving the axe space to swing and the blood to spurt.

‘Great Baal, receive our messenger!’ Huy shouted, and the axe went up, reflecting the low rays of the sun from its flashing blade. It hissed angrily as it fell, and the bull’s thick neck severed cleanly, the head seeming to leap from the trunk. Headless, the body fell to its knees and the blood pumped and gushed.

Huy leaned upon his weapon in the typical stance of the resting axeman.

‘A sign, great Baal!’ Huy shouted, making it more a demand than a request. ‘Give your children a sign!’ And his voice was tiny in the immensity of swamp and sky and water. The timeless silence of the swamps fell upon them, the silence of the ages in the smoky purple dawn.

A flight of spur-winged geese passed overhead, wings beating heavily, long necks outstretched, silhouetted darkly against the rosy streamers of sun-touched mist. Huy watched them hopefully, tempted to claim them as god-forms.

‘A sign, great Baal!’ He thrust aside the temptation, but his irritation was increasing. The sacrifice had been meticulously performed right down to the single clean stroke of the axe - was this to be one of those occasions when the god’s attention had wandered, or was he being obstinate, pig-headed? A hippopotamus splashed and snorted out in the bay, and Huy turned towards it expectantly, but the fat grey sea-cow merely fluttered its ears like bees’ wings, then submerged with a swirl.

‘A sign, great Baal!’ The third and final request, and almost immediately it was answered.

A sound rose from beyond the papyrus beds that startled the water birds into flight, that shook the fluffy white heads of the reeds, that seemed to roll across the heavens like thunder. A sound such as none of them had ever heard before. The roaring of the gry-lion.

Huy’s dark scowl vanished beneath a beatific smile, and he turned those long-lashed gazelle eyes on his prince.

‘The gods have answered you, Lannon Hycanus.’ He was seeing the faces of the priests and nobles and warriors and huntsmen, the superstitious awe with which they gazed at him. He would sacrifice privately to Baal later, nothing ostentatious or expensive, a chicken perhaps, as a gesture of thanks for this magnificent cooperation. It would rank with one of his best performances ever. Huy was so delighted with his success that he could not resist a further histrionic gesture.

‘Go out, Prince of Opet, and take your gry-lion,’ said Huy.

The little bushman led them along one of the buffalo paths. It was a green tunnel of reeds, the papyrus closing overhead to hide the sky, the damp peaty swamp earth underfoot, the musty animal swamp smell in their nostrils. They came out at last into the open grassland. Short, bright green grass cropped down by the countless herds of buffalo that infested this reach of the shore.

The bushman turned and led them along the edge of the papyrus-beds. They were an unwieldy procession, four or five hundred strong, for some of the noble nine would not come ashore to look for the gry-lion without a thick screen of archers and axemen around them. They trailed far behind Lannon’s party which consisted of Mursil the huntmaster, smelling richly of fruity Zeng wine, the bushman, Huy, the prince and his two arms-bearers.

The gods were as good as their promise that morning. The bushman led them around a bank of papyrus that thrust out into the plain like an accuser’s finger, and as they turned the point of it they came upon another bay of open grassland. It was a natural arena, fenced on three sides by the stands of dark reeds, a huge circular extent of lush grass about half a mile across.

Down the centre of this opening, lying at regular intervals, were six large dark objects, clearly visible on the open plain, but the range was too long for immediate identification.

Mursil, the huntmaster, spoke quickly to the pygmy scout in a formless dialect. Huy made a note to study this language, it was the only spoken word in all the four kingdoms in which he was not fluent.

‘My lord, he says they are dead buffalo killed by the gry-lion,’ Mursil translated on a warm wave of wine fumes.

‘Where is the beast?’ Lannon asked, and the bushman pointed.

‘It is there, behind the second carcass. It has seen and heard us, and it is lying hidden,’ Mursil explained.

‘Can he see it?’ Lannon demanded.

‘Yes, my lord. He can see the tips of its ears and its eyes. It is watching us.’

‘At that distance?’ Lannon asked with disbelief, looking down at the bushman. ‘I do not believe it.’

‘It is true, my lord. He has the eyes of an eagle.’

‘At your peril, if he is mistaken,’ Lannon warned.

‘At my peril,’ Mursil agreed readily, and Lannon turned to Huy.

‘Make ready, my bird of the sun.’

While they stripped Lannon of his armour, bound his loins in a cloth of linen, and set light hunting sandals on his feet, the rest of the party straggled up. Some of the older nobles were in litters. Asmun, looking frail and white-haired, stopped his bearers beside Lannon.

‘A clean kill,’ he wished the prince. ‘Like the one your father made.’ And they carried him to where he could have a view of the field. The party spread out along the edge of the reed bank, their arms and armour glinting in the sunlight, their robes purple and white and red, spots of gay colour against the dark reed-beds. A silence fell upon them as Lannon stepped forward and turned to face them.

His body was naked but for the loin-cloth, and the skin was smooth and startlingly white except where the sun had gilded his face and limbs. It was a beautiful body, tall and gracefully proportioned, heavy in the shoulder and narrow at waist and belly. His curls were bound with a purple headband and his red-gold beard was clubbed and turned up against his throat.

He looked at the waiting ranks before him.

‘I make claim to the city of Opet, and all the four kingdoms,’ he said with simplicity, and his voice carried clearly to every one of them.

Huy took his weapons to him. The shield. Hide of the buffalo, shaped in a long oval, tall as a man and as wide as his shoulders. In its centre were the ‘eyes’, a pair of fierce owl eyes painted in white and yellow. When these were exposed to a beast they represented the natural aggressive stare which would usually trigger the charge of a predator.

‘May this shield cover you well,’ Huy told him softly.

‘Thank you, old friend.’

Next Huy offered him the lion spear. This was such a heavy cumbersome weapon that only a powerful man could handle it. The shaft was of carefully selected hard wood, fire-treated, and bound with green leather which had been allowed to dry and shrink upon it. It was as thick as Lannon’s wrist, and twice as tall as he was.

The unbarbed blade was in proportion wide and heavy, bound into the shaft with leather strips, the round point honed to a razor edge. It was designed to allow the maximum penetration into flesh and, once buried, to open a massive wound that would induce heavy bleeding.

‘May this blade find the heart,’ Huy whispered, and then louder. ‘Roar for me, Gry-Lion of Opet.’

Lannon reached out and touched the priest’s shoulder. He squeezed it briefly.

‘Fly for me, bird of the sun,’ he said and turned away. With the shield on his back, careful not to show the ‘eyes’, Lannon walked out towards the waiting beast. He walked tall and proud in the sunlight, a king in all but name, and Huy’s heart went with him. Quietly Huy began to pray, hoping that the gods were still attentive.

Lannon strode through the soft grass that brushed his knees. As he went he remembered the advice of the oldest and best of his huntmasters, rehearsing each move, each word of it.

‘Wait until he growls before you show him the eyes.’

‘Make him come to you at an angle.’

‘He charges with head held low. You must open his chest from the side.’

‘The skull is like iron, the bones of the shoulders will turn the finest metal.’

‘There is one place only. The base of the neck, between spine and shoulder.’

Then the words of the only man amongst them all who had ever faced the gry-lion, Hamilcar Barca, the forty-sixth Gry-Lion of Opet, ‘Once the spear is in, hold it, my son, cling to it with your life. For the gry-lion is still alive and that shaft is all that will keep him from you until he dies.’

Lannon walked on steadily watching the black swollen-bellied carcass of the buffalo, seeing no sign of the beast he was hunting.

‘They are mistaken,’ he thought. ‘There is nothing here.’

He could hear his own heart beating in the silence, his own footfalls, and the hiss and suck of his breath. He watched the dead buffalo and walked on, tucking the butt of the lion spear more firmly under his right armpit.

‘There is nothing here. The gry-lion has gone,’ he thought, then suddenly he saw movement ahead of him. Just the flick of two ears held erect for a moment then flattened again, but he knew that it was there waiting for him. He felt his steps begin to drag, feet heavy with fear, but he forced himself onwards.

‘Fear is the destroyer,’ he thought, and tried to force it down, but it was a cold heavy thing like oil in his guts. He walked on, and suddenly the gry-lion stood up beside the carcass of the buffalo. It stood facing him, with ears erect, its tail swinging lazily, head up, watching him, and Lannon gasped aloud. He had not expected it to be so large. He missed a step, hesitating. It was huge, unbelievable, like something from a nightmare.

He was 200 paces from it, and he walked on towards it, concealing the ‘eyes’, and watching the giant cat’s tail swish faster with agitation as he approached.

A hundred paces from it, and now the tail began to slash angrily, like a whip against the gry-lion’s flanks. The cat crouched a little, the ears flattening against the skull. Lannon could see the eyes now, hot yellow eyes in the patterned face-mask.

He walked on, and the gry-lion’s ruff of mane came erect, swelling out the shape of its head, it sank a little lower into its crouch. Its tail slashed furiously, and Lannon walked on towards it.

Fifty paces separated them now, and the gry-lion growled. It was the muttering menace of distant thunder, the drumming of the earth in quake, a belly-jarring sound like the crash of surf on a storm-swept beach. Lannon stopped, he could not walk on with that sound in his ears. He stood frozen, staring at this terrible animal in its mounting rage.

Long seconds he hesitated, then with an abrupt movement born of tear he swept the shield from his back and showed the ‘eyes’. The glaring roundels were all that was needed to precipitate the beast’s anger. The black tufted tail froze rigid, lifted slightly above the level of its back, the head dropped low against its chest, and it charged.

At the same moment as the charge began Lannon went up on his toes, and jumped forward. The shackles of fear fell from his limbs, and he bounded towards the charging cat with long light strides. He was angling his run across the gry-lion’s front, forcing it to keep turning towards him, bringing it in at an angle, exposing the neck and the side of the chest.

As Lannon ran the spear blade danced above the earth ahead of him, like a firefly of light in the sun.

The gry-lion came fast, and low, head down so that the incredible fangs almost touched its chest, curved and ivory pale. It seemed to snake against the grass as it closed for the kill, and its enormous bulk filled the whole of Lannon’s vision.

At the last possible instant Lannon lifted the spear-tip slightly, centring it on the vital spot at the base of the neck, and the gry-lion came on to the spear with its whole weight driving it.

The blade plunged into the brown furry body, sucked into unresisting flesh, and the shock of the impact drove up the shaft and hurled Lannon backwards onto his knees - but he held on to the spear.

A storm raged about him, great waves of sound engulfed him, battering his eardrums, as the gry-lion roared out its death throes. The shaft of the lion-spear whipped and thrashed in his grip, smashing against his ribs, crushing and bruising his flesh, shaking him so his teeth clashed together in his skull lacerating his tongue. He clung to the spear.

He was lifted from his feet, riding high on the shaft of the spear as the gry-lion reared, then he was smashed down onto the earth again as the great cat plunged. He felt muscle and sinew tear in his arm and shoulders, felt the gry-lion’s claws raking the flimsy leather shield, felt weakness in his body and darkness in his head, but still the storm raged and shook him.

Once more the gry-lion roared and reared. Lannon felt himself hurled towards the heavens, the shaft of the lion-spear snapped like a brittle twig, and Lannon was thrown with the butt of it still in his hands. He flew for long seconds, bird free, then earth thumped the breath from his lungs. Painfully he dragged himself into a sitting position, and looked around him stunned, clutching the broken shaft of the spear to his chest.

Ten paces away the gry-lion was crawling towards him through the grass. The broken hilt of the spear protruded from the exact spot in the neck where Lannon had aimed. The gry-lion’s throes had worked the blade mercilessly in its own flesh, opening a hideous wound from which the bright heart blood pumped, but the gry-lion’s yellow eyes were still upon him, and those great curved fangs gleamed for his flesh.

Slowly it crawled towards him, its breath drumming in the mighty throat, dragging its paralysed hind quarters, dying but still deadly.

‘Die,’ thought Lannon, watching it with fascination, crushed by the conflict, unable to move. ‘Die,’ he thought. ‘Please die.’ And suddenly the final spasm caught the giant cat. Its back arched, the legs stiffened, claws ripping into the earth, the mouth opened wide and pink, and it groaned. One last long pitiful groan, and it died.

The half circle of watchers shouted, a cheer that was lost in the great silence of the swamps, and they began moving forward slowly towards the tiny figure of the king out on the grassy plain. But Huy was running. On legs too long for his crumpled trunk he seemed to dance over the ground, his long black tresses flowing out behind him and the vulture axe on his shoulder.

He was halfway to where Lannon sat bowed in the grass when the second gry-lion stood up from where it had lain concealed behind the carcass of the nearest buffalo, Huy saw it and shouted as he ran.

‘Lannon! Behind you! Beware!’

Lannon looked back and saw it. It was the female, lighter in colour, daintier in build, but notoriously more savage than the male. It moved towards Lannon with the deadly concentration of a stalking cat.

‘Baal speed me!’ Huy prayed as he ran towards his prince, and saw him trying to struggle to his feet. The gry-lion was slinking low along the ground, moving forward in short dashes.

Huy ran with all his might, driven by horror and fear for his prince, Lannon was on his feet now, reeling weakly away from the stalking cat. The movement triggered the hunting reflex of the gry-lion, it closed remorselessly.

Huy shouted at it. ‘Here!’ he yelled. ‘Come!’ And the cat noticed him for the first time. It lifted its head and looked at him. The fangs glinting long and pale, the eyes yellow and splendid.

‘Yes!’ shouted Huy. ‘Here I am!’ He saw Lannon stagger and fall, dropping out of sight into the grass, but he watched the beast. Saw the tail stiffen and the head drop. It began its charge, and Huy checked his.

He stood to meet the gry-lion, braced on long powerful legs, with the axe on his shoulder, and he let the cat come straight.

As it closed he fastened his gaze on the black diamond pattern between the gry-lion’s eyes, and he adjusted his grip on the axe, settling it carefully.

The axe went up and the gry-lion covered the last few paces in a soft roan-coloured blur of fluid movement, towering over the little hunchback.

‘For Baal!’ howled Huy and the axe moaned in flight. The blade cracked into skull, buried in the gry-lion’s brain and was instantly torn from his grip as the full weight of the dead beast smashed into his chest.

Huy came back from deep down and tar away along a tunnel of roaring darkness, and when he opened his eyes Lannon, Hycanus, the forty-seventh Gry-Lion of Opet, knelt over him in the sunlight.

‘The fool,’ said the king, his own face bruised and swollen, caked with drying blood. ‘Oh! The brave little fool.’

‘Brave, yes,’ whispered Huy painfully. ‘But fool never, Majesty.’ And saw the relief dawn in Lannon’s eyes.‘

They spread the wet skins of the two gry-lions on the main mast of the flagship, and Lannon Hycanus received the oaths of allegiance from the heads of the nine houses of Opet while reclining on a couch of soft fur beneath them. Huy Ben-Amon carried the cup of life, despite the protests of his king.

‘You must rest, Huy. You are badly wounded, I believe the ribs of your chest are stove—’

‘My lord, I am the cup-bearer. Would you deny me that honour?’

Asmun was the first of the nine to make oath. His sons helped him from the litter, but he shrugged away their hands as he approached Lannon.

‘In respect of the snow upon your brow, and the scars of your body, you need not kneel, Asmun.’

‘I will kneel, my king,’ replied Asmun, and went down on the deck in the sunlight. Baal must witness the oath of this frail old man. When Huy held the cup of life to his lips he sipped it, and Huy carried the cup to the king. He drank and then offered it back to Huy.

‘Drink also, my priest.’

‘It is not the custom,’ Huy demurred.

‘The King of Opet and the four kingdoms makes the custom. Drink!’

Huy hesitated a moment longer, then lifted the cup and took a long draught. By the time Habbakuk Lal, the last of the nine, came forward the cup had been refilled five times with the heavy sweet wine of Zeng.

‘Do your wounds still trouble you?’ Lannon asked softly as Huy brought the cup to him for the last time.

‘Majesty, I feel no pain,’ Huy replied and then giggled suddenly and spilled a drop of wine down the king’s chest.

‘Fly high, Sunbird,’ laughed Lannon.

‘Roar loudly, Gry-Lion,’ said Huy, and laughed with him. Lannon turned to the nobles who crowded the steering deck.

‘There is food and drink.’ The ceremony was over, Lannon Hycanus was king. ‘Habbakuk Lal!’ Lannon picked out the big ginger-bearded seaman with his freckled and sea-brined face.

‘My lord.’

‘Will you weigh, and set for Opet?’

‘A night run?’

‘Yes, I wish to reach the city before noon tomorrow, and I trust your seamanship.’

Habbakuk Lal inclined his head at the compliment and the heavy gold earrings dangled against his cheek. Then he turned on his heel, and stumped across the deck, bellowing orders at his officers.

The anchors came up over the stern, and the drummer on the forecastle of the flagship struck the hollow tree trunk with the wooden drumstick, beating out the rhythm for the racing start.

Three swift, two slow, three swift. The bank of oars dipped and swung and rose and swung forward and dipped to the beat. In perfect unison, an undulating movement, like the wet silver wing-beats of a great water bird. The long narrow hull slicing boldly through the sunset blush of lake water, the clean run of the wake streaming out behind her, the standard of house Barca hoisted at the crosstree of her masthead and her high castles fore and aft standing tall and proud above the papyrus banks on either hand.

As she swept past the other vessels of the fleet they dipped their standards, and fell in behind the flagship. Each of them holding their station meticulously in line ahead, the steersmen leaning on the rudder oar and the drum-beats booming out across the lake.

His hobbling gait was all that betrayed Huy’s discomfort as he moved from group to group upon the torch-lit deck, with each of them he pointed the bottom of the wine bowl to the starry bright night sky, and bounced the ivory dice across the deck.

‘Damn your luck,’ laughed Philo, but the laughter did not hide the anger in his brooding gypsy dark features. ‘Am I mad to dice with a favourite of the gods?’ But he stacked gold upon the board, covering Huy’s pile, and Huy scooped the dice and threw the three black fish again. Philo pulled his robes closer about him and moved away with the laughter and the shouted gibes of the watchers following him.

The bright white star of Astarte had set when at last Lannon and Huy stood together beneath the spread skins of the gry-lions and looked about the deck. It was a battlefield when the battle is spent. The bodies lay strewn about in the torch light, lying where they had fallen, loose and senseless. A wine bowl rolled back and forth with the easy motion of the ship that still sped on into the darkness.

‘Another victory,’ Lannon spoke thickly, peering blearily around at the carnage.

‘A notable victory. Majesty.’

‘I think,’ Lannon began, but did not finish. His legs buckled under him. He swayed and swung forward. Huy caught him neatly as he fell, and settled him across one shoulder. Ignoring the pain in his chest he lifted the king and carried him down to the main cabin below the deck. He dropped Lannon on the bed, and arranged his limbs and head more comfortably. A moment longer he stayed, hanging over the supine figure.

‘Sweet sleep, my beautiful king,’ he blurted and turned to stagger away to his own cabin. The slave girl rose at his entrance.

‘I have set out your writing pallet,’ she told him, and Huy peered at the scroll, ink bowl and stylus under the hanging lamp.

‘Not tonight.’ He started towards the bed, lost direction, crashed into the bulkhead and bounced backwards. The slave girl ran to help him, and steered him into port.

Huy lay on his back and looked up at her. She was one of Lannon’s household. Huy wished he could afford one like her, but she would fetch ten fingers of gold at the least.

‘Is there anything else, my lord?’ she asked. She was a pretty little thing with dark soft hair and pale ivory-yellow skin. Huy closed one eye the better to focus on her.

‘Perhaps,’ he said shyly. ‘If you will help a little.’ But his aspirations were too ambitious, and in a few moments his snores shook the ship to its keel. The girl rose, pulled on her robe and for a moment smiled down at him before she slipped out of the cabin.

In the darkness before dawn Huy stood on the forecastle of the galley and worked the axe, keeping it in flight, humming and hissing in the gloom. He felt the sluggish old wine in his veins begin to course faster, the sweat broke out on his body that the cool lake air could not quench. He changed hands smoothly on the cut, and the great axe sang. The dullness in his head lightened and the sweat poured now, streaming down his muscled legs and arms, over the bull-humped back, soaking the loin-cloth, running into his eyes, and Huy began to dance, lightly he spun and leapt and weaved, and still the axe flew.

Dawn was pinking the sky when at last he stopped and leaned upon the axe. His breath steamed and gasped in the cold stream of air, but his blood raced through his body and he felt like a man again.

In the cabin one of Lannon’s slave girls scraped the sweat from his body with the gold strigil that was a gift from Lannon. Then she rubbed him down with perfumed oil, plaited and set his hair and beard, and held a loose unbelted robe of white linen for him.

He came up on the steering-deck just as the order to heave to was passed to the fleet, and they swung towards the east to await the coming of the sun with the slave oarsmen collapsing thankfully over their oars. As the sun showed over the horizon Huy led the praise chant to Baal. Then there was breakfast on the open deck with the company squatting on mats of plaited reeds. Huy looked at their faces, grey and crumpled, baggy-eyed and bad-tempered. Even Lannon was pale and his hands shook as he breakfasted on a bowl of warm milk and honey.

Huy started on millet cakes dripping with oil and honey, then he ate a large smoked and salted lake bream, and when he called for a broiled duck reeking with rank wild garlic and more millet cakes the company watched him with awe. Huy ripped the duck to pieces and forced an expression of relish as he ate, for he was jealous of his reputation.

Philo spoke for them all when he cried at last ‘Great Baal! You insult not only your own belly but mine as well.’ And he jumped up and hurried below.

‘He is right,’ Lannon laughed for the first time that day. ‘You look like a child who has drunk nothing more poisonous than his mother’s milk.’

‘He was weaned on red Zeng wine, and he cut his teeth on the blade of a battle-axe.’

‘If the lake was wine he would lower the level so we could walk across.’

Huy twinkled at them like a mischievous gnome, and tore another leg from the carcass of the duck.

In the middle of the morning they reached the shallows and Habbakuk Lal went forward to pilot the ship through the narrow channel. Water hyacinth, papyrus and a dozen other varieties of vegetation threatened to clog the lifeline of Opet. The channel boats pulled out of the lane as the ten great ships flew past on their silver-wet wings. The officers saluted the standard of Barca at the masthead with a clenched fist, but the slave gangs who were doomed for ever to fight the lake weed stood dumbly and watched with patient animal eyes.

Closer to Opet now they began passing the fishing fleet, the nets coming in over the side with fish shining silver in the mesh like captured stars, and the white clouds of gulls shrieking and fussing overhead.

Then the cliffs came up on the horizon, glowing dusky red in the sunlight and the rail was crowded with those who were enjoying this moment of homecoming.

Mursil, the huntmaster, came to Lannon on the steering deck and knelt briefly.

‘You sent for me, Majesty.’

‘Yes - and the pygmy.’

‘He is here, King.’

‘I promised you a reward. Name it.’

‘My lord, I have three wives. All of them avaricious.’

‘Gold?’

‘If it please you, my lord.’

‘Huy, write an order on the treasury for five fingers of gold.’

‘May Baal shine upon you always!’

‘What of the pygmy?’

Mursil called the little yellow bushman to him, and Lannon examined him with interest.

‘What is he named?’

‘Xhai, my lord.’

‘Does he not understand the language?’

‘No, my lord, he speaks only his own primitive tongue.’

‘Ask him what he desires - freedom, perhaps?’

‘He does not understand the idea of freedom. He is like a dog, Majesty. Deprive him of a master and you deprive him of the reason for life.’

‘Ask him what he wants.’

Mursil and the bushman spoke for a long while in that birdlike chittering tongue, before the huntmaster turned back to the king.

‘It is a strange request.’

‘Name it.’

‘He wishes to hunt with the slayer of the gry-lion.’

Lannon stared at the bushman, who grinned at him with the beguiling candour of a child.

‘He thinks, my lord, and you will forgive the impertinence,’ Mursil was sweating a little, ill at ease, ‘he thinks you are a god, and he wants to belong to you.’

Lannon let out a bull roar of laughter and slapped his thigh.

‘So be it then. He is elevated to a master of the royal hunt - with the pay and privileges. Take him, Huy. Teach him to speak the language, or failing that learn to speak his!’

‘All the strays and cripples,’ thought Huy ruefully. His household was filled with them, whenever he had accumulated sufficient gold tor a luscious young slave maid it went on another who was too old or infirm to justify his keep and who was consigned by his master to the pool of Astarte. At least the pygmy would have his pay as a huntmaster to help with the costs.

Lannon dismissed the subject and turned back to the rail. The mother city came up over the horizon at last. The walls of the temple shone a ruddy rose in the sunlight, and the lower city was brilliant white, the walls of the houses painted with the ash of the lake shellfish.

The war fleet of Opet streamed out from the harbour to meet them. The shields and helmets of the legionaries sparkled in the sun as each ship in turn wheeled across the flagship’s bows with the gilt work on her arrow-sharp prow catching the sunlight. They saw the raw skins hanging below the standard of house Barca and a cheer roared out across the water.

The flagship led them into the harbour, still scudding to the drive of her banked oars. Habbakuk Lal aimed at the stone jetty below the city where the crowds thronged the shore. The entire population of the city was out in their best and most brilliant robes, shrieking and cheering their new king from 100,000 throats.

At the last possible moment Habbakuk Lal dropped his hand in a signal to the drummer and steersman. The ship spun on her heel, with every oar clawing at the water to drag her to a halt, her side lightly touching the stone jetty. Lannon Hycanus and his train stepped ashore.

Lannon’s wives were the first to greet him. Nine of them, one from each of the noble houses, young matrons of the blood, proud and beautiful. Each one came forward to kneel before Lannon, and call him ‘sire’ for the first time.

Huy looked at them with a heart that ached. These were not the pliant, brainless slave girls whose company was all he had ever known. These were full women. He needed someone like that to share a life with, and he had tried so hard. He had carried his suit to every one of the great houses of Opet, and had it rejected. They could see no further than his back, and he could not blame them for it.

The dignity of the occasion was abruptly shattered by a loud chorus of ‘Hoo! Hoo!’ and the twins broke away from their nursemaids and raced each other across the jetty. Ignoring their father and the gathered nobles, they ran to Huy and danced about him, tugging at his robe and demanding his attention. When he picked them up they competed so fiercely for his kisses that it developed into a hair-pulling bout. The nursemaids flew to the rescue and dragged them away.

Imilce’s hands still locked in Helanca’s golden tresses, and from the scowl on Lannon’s face Huy knew that there would be retribution and that those plump little bottoms would soon be glowing red. He wished there was some way he could prevent it.

Huy slipped away into the crowd. On the way to the temple he haggled for a chicken with one of the merchants and struck a good bargain. After he had sacrificed he went to his own house in the precinct of the priests between the outer and inner wall of the temple. His household were all there to meet him, doting and doddering, fussing about him with their grey heads and toothless gums. All agog for the news of his latest exploits, demanding the story of the hunt, while they bathed and fed him.

When at last he escaped to his sleeping quarters to rest, he had not lain tor long when the four eldest princesses arrived. Aged from ten to six, they broke through the feeble defences of his slaves and invaded his room as if by right.

With a sigh Huy abandoned rest and sent one of them to fetch his lute, and as he began to sing the slaves, one at a time, crept into the room and sat quietly along the wall. Huy Ben-Amon was home again.

In the year 533 from the founding of Opet, six months after he had taken the gry-lion and claimed the four kingdoms. Lannon Hycanus, the head of house Barca, left the city of Opet and went out to march around his borders, a custom that would bind his claim irrevocably. He was twenty-nine years old in that spring, a year older than his high priest.

He marched with four of his wives, the childless ones, hoping to change their status upon the two-year journey. He took with him two legions each of 6,000 hoplites, light infantry, axemen and archers. The legions were composed mostly of Yuye freedmen with officers from the noble families of Opet. These legions were organized along the Roman lines, in the manner that Hannibal had adopted during his campaign in Italia. There were ten cohorts to a legion and six centuries to a cohort. They were uniformed in leather body armour with conical iron helmets and circular leather shields studded with bronze rosettes. On their legs and feet they wore leather greaves and nailed sandals, and they sang as they marched.

The officers were more magnificently appointed as befitted their noble origins. Their armour was of bronze and their cloaks were of fine linen dyed purple and red, and they marched at the head of their divisions.

There was no cavalry. In 500 years no attempt to bring horses from the north had succeeded. Every one of the animals had succumbed to the sea voyage, or surviving that had died soon after arrival at Opet of a mysterious disease that made their coats stand on end and turned their eyeballs to bloody red jelly.

In place of cavalry were the elephants. Huge, ugly-tempered beasts, who struck terror into the hearts of the enemies of Opet when they charged with the archers in the castles upon their backs loosing a shower of arrows as they came on. In battle frenzy, however, they could wreak as much havoc amongst their own army as that of the enemy, and their handlers were equipped with a mallet and spike to drive into the brains of the berserk animals. Lannon took twenty-five of these beasts upon his march.

With him went his high priest and a dozen lesser priests, engineers, physicians, armourers, cooks, slaves and a huge flock of camp followers: merchants, prospectors, gamblers, soothsayers, liquor-sellers and prostitutes. The bullock train carrying the tentage and supplies stretched for seven miles, while the whole unwieldy column spread out over fifteen miles. This was no problem in the huge unpeopled grass plains of the south with their plentiful supplies of water and forage, but when Huy Ben-Amon stood on a low hill with his king and saw the slow straggling mass coming down out of the north he thought of the time when they would turn north again in a great circle amongst the forests and broken country along the great river. Such a collection of wealth would be a sore temptation to the pagan war bands from the unknown lands beyond the river. He told Lannon his misgivings and Lannon laughed, crinkling his pale blue eyes into the sun.

‘You think more like a soldier than a priest.’

‘I am both.’

‘Of course.’ Lannon dropped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Not for nothing the command of the sixth legion - well, Huy, I have thought much of this march. In the past, it has always been a great time-waster and a sorry expense on the treasury of Opet. My march will be different. I intend to turn a profit.’

Huy smiled at that magic word, the one understood by all in Opet, noble or commoner, king or priest.

‘I intend to make this a different type of march. In the south kingdom we will hunt - hunts such as you have never conceived, and the meat will be smoked and dried and sold to the houses and mines to feed their slaves. We will hunt also for elephant. I would like my army to have 200 of these animals to meet the threats from the north of which you have just reminded me.’

‘I had wondered at the multitude of empty wagons that follow us.’

‘They will be filled before we turn northwards again,’ Lannon promised. ‘And when we pass through the gardens of Zeng, I will change the garrisons there, leaving these men in their place. Troops who stay too long in one billet grow lazy and corrupt. At Zeng I will meet the emissaries of the Dravs from the east and renew our treaty with them.’

‘But what of the north?’ Huy came back to his original question.

‘From Zeng we will march north in battle array. The women and the others will be sent home to Opet along the road through the middle kingdom. We will come to the river with two full legions to reinforce the two already there, and we will cross the river on a burning and slave-taking raid that will warn the tribes beyond that a new king reigns in Opet.’

Lannon turned and glared towards the north, and his mane of golden and red hair and beard shone in the sunlight.

‘For a hundred years now they have plagued us, and we have been too soft with them. Each year they have grown more numerous, more daring. I will show them the iron of my hand, Sunbird. I will show them that the river is held by a barrier of bright steel, and they will press against it at their cost.’

‘Where do they come from, I wonder, and how many of them are there?’ Huy asked softly.

‘They are the hosts of darkness, black because they are not of the sun-god Baal as we are. They were spawned in darkness in the forests of eternal night to the north, and when you can number the greedy locusts, then you will count them also.’

‘Are you afraid, Lannon?’ Huy asked, and the king turned to him with a fiery anger darkening his face.

‘You presume, priest,’ he snarled.

‘Call me friend, not priest - and I do presume to show you that unreasoning hatred is based on fear.’

Lannon’s anger faded, and he fiddled with the hilt of his sword, glancing about to make sure that his aides were out of earshot.

‘There is reason for fear,’ he said at last.

‘I know,’ said Huy.

Huy led the praise chant to Baal in the dawn, but they kept the volume of their voices low so as not to alarm the nearest herds, and afterwards Huy asked the gods to look with favour upon the hunt, promising that a part of the spoils would be left for the Sunbirds to carry on high. Then Huy and Lannon drank a bowl of wine and ate a dry millet cake together as they waited for the hunt to develop.

Mursil, the huntmaster of the south, had chosen the ground with cunning and care. From where they sat on the low line of the escarpment they could look down the vast funnel-shaped plain hemmed in by hills on either hand; along the summit of the hills the signal fires smoked in the early morning to show that the warriors were in position there to turn any of the game that tried to cross out of the valley.

In the distance, beyond the range of the eye the two legions were spread out across the plain. Already they were moving forward, 10,000 men, sweeping the grassland like a wave across the beach. The dust of their advance rose palely against the egg-shell blue of the morning sky, and below the pall an occasional flash of light came from helmet or spear.

‘It has begun,’ said Lannon with satisfaction.

Huy looked out on the tens of thousands of grazing animals scattered in herds about the plain. This was the tenth great hunt in fifty days, and the slaughter was beginning to sicken him a little.

He glanced down to where the plain narrowed and the river that bisected it ran down onto the neck. At the base, squeezed into a wedge shape by the hills, was a gap of 500 paces which promised escape to the limitless expanse of grassland beyond. The whole plain was thinly scattered with tall flat-topped acacia trees.

Even from where they sat above the gap they could barely see the treble line of concealed pits across the gap that joined the spurs of the two ranges of hills. A thousand of Lannon’s archers lay in ambush there, each with a bundle of 300 arrows and a spare bow.

Beyond them still was a double line of netting, heavy woven mesh standing on flimsy poles that would collapse when a heavy body charged into it, smothering the animal in its folds until one of the hoplites could jump up from his hiding-place and run forward with a javelin to dispatch the animal and reset the net. Here another 1,000 javelin throwers lay in waiting.

‘We should go down now.’ Lannon finished the last of the wine and brushed a few crumbs from his cloak.

‘A little longer,’ Huy suggested. ‘I should like to watch this.’

A restlessness was running through the herds upon the plain, beginning with the animals nearest the lines of beaters. The long lines of gnu began running in aimless circles with their noses almost raking the ground, black bodies with long flowing manes kicking and frolicking. The herds of zebra grouped themselves in compact masses of some 200 or 300 animals and looked curiously towards the line of approaching beaters. Their close relatives, the quagga, short and sturdier, assembled in lesser herds, a darker bay colour than the grey zebra. Mixed with them were herds of brilliant yellow and red hartebeest, purple sassaby, and the great bovine eland, striped and maned and majestic. This vast multitude began a stirring and moving, a general slow retreat down the valley towards the gap - and the dust rose around them.

‘Ah,’ said Lannon. ‘What a booty.’

‘There could never have been a greater in the history of the hunt,’ Huy agreed.

‘How many, do you think?’ Lannon asked.

‘I do not know - fifty, a hundred thousand - it would not be possible to count them.’

Now the long-necked giraffe were infected by the growing alarm, they left the shelter of the acacia trees and their calves followed them as they joined the mass movement down the valley. Amongst the host trotted an occasional rhinoceros, big and cumbersome, horned and snorting, lifting his massive hooves high as he ran,

Like a flux holding the entire mass together moved the smoky brown herds of dainty springbok. They came on down the valley, moving more urgently, like flood waters, and the dust rose thicker, swirling up in choking clouds. The hills squeezed the herds into a denser mass, and when the harte-beest and sassaby tried to cross the ridges on either hand there was a line of screaming, weapon-brandishing men to meet and turn them from the crest. They charged down the slopes again carrying and spreading the panic through the closely packed herds below.

They surged forward, and the sound of their hooves rose like the sound of storm, surf and wind. The ground began to shake. ‘Come,’ shouted Lannon and he jumped up and went bounding down the slope. For a moment longer Huy watched that unbelievable phalanx of living creatures thundering down on the gap, then he shouldered his axe and went racing down the slope after Lannon. His long black hair streamed out behind him, and he ran goat-footed, rabbit fast, so that he and Lannon came out on the plain together and Huy led the way into the centre of the gap where a pit had been dug for them and a dozen bundles of javelins lay ready.

Lannon jumped down beside him. ‘There was no gold on that race,’ he laughed.

‘There should have been,’ said Huy, and they went to the front lip of the pit and looked up the valley. It was a terrifying sight. The entire valley from side to side was clogged with a great tide of living things, and above them rose a high brown wall of dust through which the low sun glared bale-fully.

The heads and manes of the lead animals tossed and heaved like the surface of a torrent, and above them rose the stick-like necks of the giraffe and ostrich. The whole bore down upon them, and the earth trembled beneath them and they stared in awe and wonder.

Lannon was judging his moment carefully, waiting for the first wave of game to cross his range-markers. The moment came and he snapped an order to his trumpeter. The single urgent note of the attack rang out, repeated stridently over and over again.

From the earth at the feet of the advancing wall of living things rose the line of archers. They loosed four times before the wall swept over them. Four thousand arrows in twenty seconds and those that followed fell over the wind-rows of dead animals, screaming with the agony of broken bone and arrow-impaled flesh.

Borne by the weight of their own forward momentum the masses of game pressed onwards while flight after flight of arrows decimated their ranks, and the corpses and wounded piled in ridges and huge mounds.

The smaller game were wiped out by the archers, but the larger thick-skinned animals came through with the arrows bristling in their flanks. Great grey rhinoceros, lumbering wild-eyed towards the line of nets, tossing their long curved nose horns. Giraffe galloping long-legged and terror-driven. A squadron of black buffalo running in a mass, shoulder to shoulder like a team in span.

They came into the nets, and fell struggling and screaming. The javelins whipped into them as they rolled and roared, smothered in the folds of heavy netting. Desperately Lannon and his men worked to clear the dead from the netting and reset the poles, but it was effort wasted. There were too many of them now, and there was death out there in the open beyond the security of the pits. Arrow-maddened, the wounded game charged for any man who showed himself.

Huy saw a soldier tossed by an angry rhinoceros. He cartwheeled in the air, and fell on the hard earth to be kicked and trampled to a muddy pulp in the dust by the hordes that followed.

From the pit now Lannon hurled his javelins with an uncanny accuracy and power, aiming each bolt for the soft ribs behind the shoulder of the passing game. He piled the bodies about the pit, shouting and laughing in the frenzied excitement of the hunt.

Huy also was infected by it. He danced and shouted and waved his axe, guarding Lannon’s back and flank, hurling a javelin when some huge animal seemed about to crash into the pit on top of them.

Both he and Lannon were soaked with their own sweat and caked with the swirling dust; a stone flung by a dashing hoof had cut Huy’s forehead open to the bone of the skull and he ripped the hem from his tunic and bound the wound quickly, hardly interrupting his dance of excitement.

In front of them the archers had been overwhelmed by the sheer weight of animal flesh. With their arrows exhausted they cowered in their pits and let the solid ranks pour over them.

Huy saw the fresh ranks driving down on them and he grabbed his blood-crazed king and dragged him struggling to the floor of the pit, and they lay with their heads covered by their arms while the edges of the pit crumbled in on top of them under the impact of hooves. Earth smothered them and they covered their faces with the hems of their tunics and gasped for breath.

A young zebra stallion fell into the pit on top of them, kicking and neighing in terror, with its powerful yellow teeth snapping indiscriminately; it was a deadly danger.

Huy rolled away from its flying razor-sharp hooves. He paused a moment to aim and then shot his right arm upwards. The spiked head of the vulture axe lanced up under the terrified animal’s jaw, entering the brain cleanly. It collapsed warm and limp and shivering on top of them, and its corpse was a protection from the storm of hooves that raged about them.

The storm dwindled, passed over, and rumbled away into the distance. In the quiet that followed, Huy rolled towards Lannon.

‘Are you safe?’ And Lannon crawled with difficulty from under the dead zebra. They dragged themselves from the pit and looked about them with wonder.

Across a front of 500 paces, and to a depth of the same distance the ground was covered by a thick carpet of dead and dying game. From their pits amongst this terrible carnage the archers and javelin-throwers climbed and stood staring with the dazed air of drunken men.

The line of beaters seemed to wade towards them out of a swamp of hanging dust, even the sky was dulled with the dust, and the pitiful cries and the bleating, of the dying and wounded animals shamed the silence.

The beaters came forward in lines through the fields of bleeding flesh and their swords rose and fell as they killed the wounded. Huy reached under his tunic and brought out a leather flask of Zeng wine.

‘I can always trust you for comfort.’ Lannon grinned, and drank greedily. The wine drops shone like blood in his dusty beard.

‘Was there ever a hunt like that?’ he asked as he handed the flask to Huy.

Huy drank and then looked about him at the field. ‘I cannot believe there ever was,’ he said softly.

‘We will smoke and dry this kill - and then hunt again,’ Lannon promised and strode away to order the butchery.

A high dome of orange light hung over the plain, light reflected from 10,000 fires. All afternoon and all that night the army worked to butcher the enormous bag. To cut the flesh into strips and hang it on the rocks over the smoking fires. The smell of sweet raw flesh, the musty reek of split entrails, and the sizzle of the cooking meat drifted across the camp where Huy sat beneath the awning of his leather tent and worked by the fluttering light of an oil lamp.

Lannon came out of the darkness, still filthy with dust and dried blood.

‘Wine! Sunbird, for the love of a friend.’ He pretended to stagger with thirst, and Huy passed both amphora and bowl to him. Scorning the bowl Lannon drank directly from the neck of the jug and wiped his beard on his arm.

‘I come with news,’ he grinned. ‘The bag was 1,700 head.’

‘How many of them men?’

‘Fifteen men died, and there are some wounded - but was it not worth it?’

Huy did not answer, and Lannon went on.

‘There is more news. Another of my javelins has struck the mark. Annel has missed her moon.’

‘The southern air must be beneficial. All four of them with child in two months.’

‘It is not the air, Sunbird,’ Lannon laughed and drank again.

‘I am pleased,’ said Huy. ‘More of the old blood for Opet.’

‘When did you ever care for blood, Huy Ben-Amon? You are pleased to have more of my brats to spoil - I know you.’ Lannon came to stand behind Huy. ‘You are writing,’ he said, unnecessarily. ‘What is it?’

‘A poem,’ said Huy modestly.

‘What of?’

‘The hunt - today’s hunt.’

‘Sing it to me,’ commanded Lannon and dropped onto Huy’s fur bed, with the amphora still grasped by the neck.

Huy fetched his lute, and squatted on the reed mat. He sang, and when he had finished Lannon lay quietly on the bed staring out through the opening of the tent into the night.

‘I did not see it like that,’ he said at last. ‘To me it was just a taking, a harvest of flesh.’

He was silent again.

‘I have displeased you?’ Huy asked, and Lannon shook his head.

‘Do you truly believe that what we did today has destroyed something that will never be replaced?’ he asked.

‘I do not know, perhaps not - but if we hunted like that every day, or even once every ten days, would we not soon turn this land into a desert?’

Lannon brooded quietly over the half-empty amphora for a long while, then he looked up at Huy and smiled.

‘We have taken sufficient meat. We will not hunt again this year - only for ivory.’

‘My lord, has the wine jug stuck to your hand?’ Huy asked softly, and Lannon stared at him for a moment then laughed.

‘A trade, Sunbird, another song and I will give you wine.’

‘A fair trade,’ Huy agreed.

When the amphora was empty, Huy sent one of his ancient slaves for another.

‘Bring two,’ suggested Lannon. ‘It will save time later.’

At midnight Huy was soft from the wine, and desolated by the beauty of his own voice and the sadness of his own song. He wept, and Lannon seeing him weep, wept with him.

‘I will not have such beauty recorded on the skin of beasts,’ cried Lannon with the tears cutting runnels through the dust on his cheeks and pouring into his beard. ‘I will have a scroll made of the finest gold, and on it you will inscribe your songs, my Sunbird. Then they will live forever to delight my children and my children’s children.’

Huy stopped weeping. The artist in him aroused, his mind quickly assimilating the offer which he knew Lannon would not remember in the morning.

‘I am truly honoured, my lord.’ Huy went to kneel at the side of the bed. ‘Will you sign the treasury order now?’

‘Write it, Huy, write it now, this instant,’ Lannon commanded. ‘I will sign it.’

And Huy ran for his writing pallet.

The column moved on slowly in a great circle-to the south and east through the southern plains of grass. It was a land of such limitless dimensions that the fifteen-mile column was as significant as a file of safari ants. There were rivers and ranges of hills, forests and plains teeming with game. The only men they met were the garrisons of the king’s hunting camps. Their task was primarily to provide a steady supply of dried meat for the multitudes of slaves that were the foundation of the nation’s prosperity.

They crossed the river of the south* six months after departure from the city of Opet and 100 miles beyond they reached the range of thickly forested blue mountains** which marked the border of the southern kingdom.

* Limpopo River ** Zoutspansberg

They went into camp at the mouth of a dark rocky gorge that tore its way through the heart of the mountains, and Lannon and Huy with a cohort of infantry and archers took the precipitous path through the gorge. It was an eerie place of tall black stone cliffs hanging high above the roaring frothing torrent in the depths below. It was a cold dark place where the warmth of the sun seldom penetrated. Huy shivered, not from the cold, and clutched his axe firmly. He prayed almost continually during the three days that they marched through the mountains for it was most certainly a place frequented by demons.

They camped on the southern slopes of the mountains and built signal fires, sending the smoke aloft in tall columns that could be seen for fifty miles. To the southward stretched a land as vast as that to the north.

Looking out across its golden rolling grasslands and its dark green forests, Huy felt a sense of awe. ‘I would like to go down into that land,’ he told Lannon.

‘You would be the first,’ Lannon agreed. I wonder what it holds. What treasures, what mysteries?‘

‘We know there is a Cape to the far south with a flat-topped mountain where the fleet of Hycanus IX was destroyed, but that is all we know.’

‘I have a mind to defy the prophecy and lead an expedition southwards beyond these mountains - what say you, Huy?’

‘I would not counsel it, my lord,’ Huy answered formally. ‘No good ever comes of challenging the gods, they have damnably long memories.’

‘I expect you are right,’ Lannon conceded. ‘Yet I am sorely tempted.’

Huy changed a subject which was making him uncomfortable, he should never have broached it.

‘I wonder when they will come.’ He looked up at the smoke from the signal fires streaming up into the calm blue of the midday sky.

‘They will come when they are ready,’ Lannon shrugged. ‘But I wish they would make it soon. Whilst we wait, we will hunt the leopard.’

For ten days they hunted the big spotted cats which abounded in the misty cliffs and woody gorges of the mountains. They hunted with specially trained hounds and lion-spears. They would run the quarry with the pack, until it was cornered or bayed and they would then surround it and close in until the charge was provoked.

Then the man selected by the leopard would take the snarling, slashing animal on the point of his spear. Two of the hunters were killed in those ten days - and one of them was a grandson of Asmun. the old nobleman. He was a fine brave lad and they all mourned, although it was a good and honourable death. They cremated his body, tor he had died in the field, and Huy sacrificed for a safe passage of his soul to the sun.

On the eleventh day, in the dawn after Huy had greeted Baal, and they had breakfasted and were dressing and arming for the hunt, Huy noticed the agitation and restlessness of the little bushman huntmaster, Xhai.

‘What is it that troubles you, Xhai?’ he asked him in his own language, which he now spoke with authority.

‘My people are here,’ the bushman told him.

‘How do you know that?’ Huy demanded.

‘I know it!’ Xhai answered simply, and Huy hurried through the camp to Lannon’s tent.

‘They have come, my lord,’ he told him.

‘Good.’ Lannon laid aside his lion-spear and began stripping his hunting armour. ‘Call the stone-finders.’ And the royal geologists and metallurgists came hurrying to the summons.

The meeting place was at the foot of the mountains where thick forest ended abruptly at the edge of a wide glade.

Lannon led his party down amongst the rocks and at the edge of the glade they halted, and threw out a protective screen of archers. In the centre of the glade, well out of arrow-shot of the forest edge or the rocky slope, a pole had been driven into the soft earth and the tail of a reed buck dangled from it like a standard. It was the sign that the trade could begin.

Lannon nodded to his senior path-finder, Aziru, and Rib-Addi, master of the royal treasury. The two of them walked out into the glade unarmed and with two slaves following them. The slaves each carried a leather bag.

At the foot of the pole was a dried gourd which contained a handful of bright pebbles and stones of various colours ranging from glassy to fiery red.

The two officials examined each stone, rejecting some by dropping them in a neat pile on the earth, selecting others by returning them to the gourd. Then from the leather bags they doled out glass beads into a pottery jar which they placed beside the gourd. They withdrew to the rocky slope where Lannon and his archers stood.

The waited until a dozen tiny figures left the edge of the forest and approached the pole. The troop of little bushmen squatted beside the gourd and jar and there was a long heated debate before they withdrew to the forest once more. The two officials went out into the glade and found gourd and jar untouched. The offer had been refused. They added a dozen iron arrow-heads to the offering.

At the third attempt a bargain was struck when the bushmen accepted the beads and arrow-heads and copper bangles, leaving the stones to be collected.

Then another batch of stones was set out beside the pole and haggled over. It was a tedious business which occupied four whole days, and while they waited Huy added considerably to his knowledge of geology.

‘From where do these sun stones come?’ he asked Aziru, as he examined a yellow diamond the size of an acorn which had been traded for a pound’s weight of glass beads.

‘When sun and moon show together in the sky, then it may happen that their rays mingle and become hot and heavy. They fall to earth, and if they strike water then they are quenched and freeze into one of these sun stones.’ Huy found this explanation utterly convincing.

‘A love-drop of Baal and Astarte,’ he whispered with reverence. ‘No wonder then that they are so beautiful.’ He looked up at Aziru. ‘Where do the pygmies find them?’

‘It is said that they search in the gravel beds of the rivers, and also the edge of the lakes,’ Aziru explained. ‘But they are not adept at recognizing the true sun stone and their offerings contain many common stones.’

When the bushmen had traded their entire gathering of diamonds, they offered for sale the unwanted children of the tribe. These little yellow mites were left bound and shivering with terror beside the trading pole. The slave masters, experts in appraising human flesh, went out to examine them and offer payment. The pygmies were much in demand as slaves, for they were tractable, loyal and hardy. They made excellent hunters, guides, entertainers, and, strangely, children’s companions.

Xhai stood behind his tall yellow-haired king and watched the trade, exactly the bargaining which had been conducted over him as a child.

At the end of the fourth day the treasury of Opet had acquired five large pottery jars of fine diamonds. Trade in these stones was a jealously guarded monopoly of the ruling house of Barca. In addition there were eighty-six bushman children between the ages of five and fifteen years. They were wild slaves, and had to be bound until tamed.

Huy devoted himself almost entirely to their welfare during the return across the mountains. With the help of Xhai and the other tame bushmen he was able to save most of them. Only a dozen of the tiny creatures died of terror and heartbreak before they could be handed over to the slave women of the main camp.

Lannon broke the camp under the southern mountains and they turned north and east, recrossing the river and picking up the mountains of Bar-Zeng* on the horizon. They began passing through the populous kingdom of the east, where the Yuye peasants farmed the corn lands along the Lion River**.

* The Chimanimani Mountains **The Sabi River

At each settlement the freedmen turned out to welcome them, and make tribute to their new king. They were a cheerful throng, and the mud-walled villages were clean and prosperous-looking. Even the slaves in the fields were sleek and well cared for, only a fool would abuse a valuable possession. The slaves were mostly blacks, taken in the north, but amongst them were those of mixed blood, sired by their own masters, or by selected stud slaves. They were unbound, differing little in dress or ornament from their masters.

Along their way the legionaries who had completed their military service left their regiments and returned to their villages. Their places in the ranks were filled by the young recruits.

They camped each night at one of the walled and fortified garrisons that studded the road to the mountains of Zeng. They were passing now through the fringes of the wide gold belt that ran east and west across the middle kingdom. It was this belt on which the wealth of Opet was based, and the king’s stone-finders had developed an almost supernatural ability to find the enriched reefs in which the gold was hidden. The results of their efforts were numerous mines where the ore was prised from the earth by platoons of black slaves working naked in the narrow stifling stopes. At the surface it was crushed and the powdered rock washed from the grains of native gold in specially designed copper basins.

Lannon paused in his march to inspect many of these works, and Huy was impressed by the ingenuity of the engineers who overcame the problems that the extraction of the ore presented at each separate site.

Where the gold-bearing reef was narrow, they kept the headroom in the stopes as low as possible by using only women and children in the workings.

They employed elephants for hauling the ore baskets to the surface, and for carrying water to the mines situated in the drier areas.

They had developed a method of undermining massive ore bodies and collapsing them under their own weight. It was a dangerous procedure, and at one of the mines practising this method Lannon and Huy were kept from sleep the entire night by the mourning wailing from the slave compound. During the day an ore body had collapsed prematurely and over a hundred slaves with a few slave-masters had been crushed beneath it. Huy wondered how much of that hideous sound was on account of the dead slave-masters.

Driven by his insatiable curiosity, Huy had himself lowered in one of the ore baskets to the lower levels of one of the workings. It was a hellish place of foul air, and heat and sweat, lit by the flickering oil lamps. The naked slaves toiled in cramped and dangerous chambers hacked from the living rock. Huy watched an intrusive outcrop of harder rock demolished by the means Hannibal had used hundreds of years before to clear his passage across the alps. A slow fire was lit and kept burning upon the rock until it had heated to a dull glow. It was quenched then with buckets of liquid, a mixture of water and sour wine, that exploded in a swirling cloud of steam, and split the rock into chunks which were hacked out and dragged away by the slaves. Huy went to the face where he saw the native gold shine in the mother lode, rich and yellow, and he mused at the price that must be paid for its extraction.

When Huy was again hoisted to the surface he was soaked with sweat, and filthy with dirt from the stopes.

Lannon shook his head. ‘What did you want to do that for? Have the birds got your brain, that you must grovel around in the earth?’

At one of the mines the ore had been exhausted above the level of the subterranean water. It was impossible to go down below this level, for no method had yet been devised to clear the water from the workings. Bucket chains of slaves were seldom able to lower the level by more than a few inches. The mine must be returned to Astarte the mother of moon and earth. She had given of her bounty, and in return she must receive.

Lannon, as was his right, selected the messengers, conferring with his slave-masters to decide which fifteen slaves would be the least loss to the labour force. The gods were not particular about the quality of the sacrifice. To them a life was a life, and therefore acceptable.

Huy’s heart went out to them as they were led down into the workings for the last time. They wore the symbolic chains of the sacrifice, and they shuffled along, stooped and maimed and coughing with the lung disease of the miners.

Huy delegated one of his priests to supervise the sending, and when his emissary emerged from that evil pit Huy led the praise chant to Astarte, and the work of refilling the mine began. It would continue for many weeks because of the amount of rock that must be carefully repacked into the caverns.

This refilling was necessary to placate the earth mother further and also to allow new gold to grow.

Aziru explained the need for this. ‘This is benevolent ground, suitable for the growth of gold. We replace rock in the earth and the action of the sun upon it will, in time, engender a fresh growth of the precious metal.’

‘All life is in Baal,’ Huy intoned formally.

‘Our children’s children will one day thank us for this seeding of the earth,’ Aziru predicted smugly, and Huy was impressed with this forethought - and he recorded every detail of it all in his neatly flowing script.

Three hundred days after leaving the city of Opet, the column climbed the foothills of the Zeng Mountains.* The air was cool and fresh after the heat of the lowlands, and at night the mist hung heavily along the slopes and woke the fever in men’s bones so that they shivered and huddled in their cloaks about the campfires.

* Inyanga Mountains

Those hills were the gardens of Opet, where tens of thousands of acres of land had been terraced and cultivated, and where tens of thousands of slaves tended the olive groves and vineyards. The centre and citadel of these gardens was a fortified hilltop town named after the twelfth Gry-Lion of Opet, Zeng-Hanno. Here there were temples to both Baal and Astarte, the religious strongholds of the eastern kingdom, and Huy spent twenty days in synod with his priests and priestesses. Huy also exercised and inspected his own personal legion, the sixth Ben-Amon, which was the only one of the eight legions of Opet composed entirely of warriors of the blood. Their standard was a golden vulture set on a shaft of polished ebony.

These religious activities were interrupted when Lannon summoned Huy to accompany him on a short journey to the east, from whence word had come that the Dravs awaited Lannon to renew the five-year treaty.

Three sheikhs of the Drav met them when they descended the mountains of Zeng towards the eastern sea. They were tall, brown-skinned men with fierce eagle features and dark glittering eyes. They wore head-dresses of white over their long black hair, and they dressed in full-length robes belted with sashes of filigree and semi-precious stones. Each carried a magnificent broad curved dagger at his waist, and wore slippers with long pointed toes.

Their warriors dressed differently, wearing baggy pantaloons, on their heads onion-shaped helmets, body armour of silver breastplates; and they were armed with round iron shields and long curved scimitars, spears and short oriental bows. Most of them were Negroes, but they had clearly adopted the Drav manner of speech and dress. Two hundred years of relentless warfare had preceded the treaty between the Drav and the kings of Opet.

The two armies bivouacked on each side of a wide valley, with a stream of clear water overhung with shady green trees separating the camps.

Under these trees the council tents were pitched, and here for five days the two delegations feasted and bargained and manoeuvred diplomatically.

Huy spoke the language of the Dravs and he translated tor Lannon the negotiations towards a treaty of unrestricted trade and mutual military aid.

‘My lord, Prince Hassan is concerned to know how many warriors Opet could put into the field in the event of a threat to the security of the two nations.’

They sat on piles of silken cushions and lovely woven woollen rugs of vivid design and colour, drinking sherbet, for the Drav would not touch even the finest wines, eating a dish of mutton and fish spiced with herbs, smiling at each other and not trusting each other farther than the range of the eye.

‘Prince Hassan,’ replied Lannon, nodding and smiling at him, ‘is concerned to know with what force we would oppose an attempt to seize the gardens of Zeng and the gold mines of the middle kingdom.’

‘Of course,’ Huy agreed. ‘What shall I tell him?’

‘Tell him I can field fourteen regular legions, as many auxiliaries, and 400 elephants.’

‘He will not believe those figures, my lord.’

‘Of course not, no more do I believe his. Tell him anyway.’ And so the bargaining proceeded in an atmosphere of mutual trust.

They agreed to secure each other’s flanks, combine to hold the line of the great river in the north against invasion by the migrant black tribes, and to come to each other’s assistance if that border was violated.

‘The prince would like to revolve the unit of trade, my lord. He suggests that 500 mikthals should equal one Opet finger of gold.’

‘Tell him politely to swing on his own testicles,’ Lannon replied, smiling at the prince, and the prince nodded and smiled back at him, the gem stones sparkling and glittering on his fingers.

They set the rate of exchange at 590 mikthals per finger, and went on to negotiate the slaving agreement, and the cotton and silk clauses. On the fifth day they ate salt together and exchanged extravagant gifts, while the armies gave displays of archery and swordsmanship and drill. These were intended to impress the other side.

‘Their archers are ineffectual,’ Lannon appraised them.

‘The bow is too short, and they draw to the waist not the chin,’ Huy agreed. ‘They limit their range and accuracy.’

Then later when the infantry drilled:

‘Their infantry are lighter armed and armoured, my lord. They have no axemen, and I doubt those breastplates would turn an arrow.’

‘And yet they move fast, and they have a fiery spirit - do not dismiss them lightly, my Sunbird.’

‘No, my lord. I will not do that.’

The elephants charged across the open ground with the archers in their castles spraying a shower of arrows ahead of the line. The huge grey beasts tossed and trampled the lines of straw dummies and their squeals and trumpets rang against the crest of the hills.

‘See their faces,’ Lannon murmured. ‘The prince seems to be looking on the eternal seas!’ And it was true that the Dravs were silent and subdued for they had no elephants of their own, they had not mastered the art of training them.

They parted and when Lannon and Huy looked back into the valley they saw the Drav army winding away eastwards in column, with the sunlight sparkling on helmets and spearheads.

‘Our eastern border is secure for five more years,’ Lannon declared with satisfaction.

‘Or until the princes change their minds,’ Huy qualified.

‘No, Sunbird. They must honour the treaty - it is in their own best interest. Trust me, old friend.’

‘You, I trust,’ said Huy.

On the return to Zeng-Hanno the legions assembled and preparations began for the burning which Lannon planned to lead across the great river.

Huy’s legion was one of those chosen, and he spent much time with his priest-officers. They dined with him in the splendid quarters set aside for him within the enclosure of the temple of Baal. Huy invited the reverend priestesses of Astarte, and provided magnificent fare for he had hunted the day before and there was game to add to the beef and chicken and fish seasoned with spices traded from the Drav, while the gardens of Zeng provided the best of their fruits and wines.

Lannon was the guest of honour, and they were all decked with wreaths of flowers and boisterous with wine.

‘Reverend Mother,’ one of Huy’s priests, a handsome young rake named Bakmor, called across the board to the High Priestess of Astarte. ‘Is it true that you have discovered a new oracle among your novices to replace the Lady Imilce who died two years ago of the shivering sickness?’

The reverend mother turned wise old eyes on the young officer. She had pale, brittle-looking skin and her hair was fine and fluffy white. Her arms were thin and pale also and her hands skeletal and corded with blue veins. Up until now she had sat withdrawn from the revelry.

‘It is true that one of the temple novices shows wisdom and wit beyond her years or training, it is true also that she has seen beyond the veil and made prophecy, but the sisterhood has not yet decided to send her to the High Priest for examination.’

‘Is there doubt then, Reverend Mother?’ Bakmor insisted.

‘There is always doubt, my son,’ the priestess answered, in a tone that clearly rebuked his presumption and the youngster sat back discomforted.

‘I have not heard of this,’ Huy remarked with interest and a trace of accusation in his tone. For two years the priesthood had been without the services of an oracle, and the search had been diligent. Fees for divination and prophecy formed a significant proportion of the temple income, and there were also political reasons why Huy was anxious to find a successor to Lady Imilce.

‘Forgive me, Holy Father. I had determined to discuss this with you privately,’ the High Priestess spoke confidentially, but Lannon leaned across Huy to join the discussion.

‘Send for the wench,’ he said, speaking thickly with wine. The priestess stiffened at his choice of words. ‘Send for her, let her entertain us with her prophecies.’

‘My lord,’ Huy wished to remonstrate but Lannon brushed his protest aside, and raised his voice.

‘Send for the oracle - let her speak on the outcome of the campaign to the north.’

Huy turned back to the priestess with an apology in his eyes.

‘The king commands,’ he said, and the priestess inclined her head then turned to whisper to her body slave. The slave hurried from the hall.

When she came the loud voices and laughter stilled, and they stared at her with curiosity. She was a tall girl with finely boned wrists and ankles. She wore the long green robes of the temple novice which left her arms bare, and her skin had a lustre and smoothness which made it glow in the lamp light. Her hair was dark and soft, so that it floated cloudlike to her shoulders. She wore the gold crescent moon emblem of Astarte on her deep bulging forehead, dangling from a fine chain of gold, and her earrings were two small sun stones that shone like the stars of heaven.

Her eyes were green, a colour that reminded Huy of the pool of Astarte in the cavern of the temple of Opet. Her lips were full and quivered faintly, betraying her agitation at his unexpected summons, while there were spots of colour in her cheeks. However, her manner was calm and controlled, and she moved with dignity to where Huy sat. He saw then that she was very young.

‘Pray for me, Holy Father,’ she greeted him and bowed her head. Huy studied her avidly, taken with her direct manner and her dignity.

‘Greet your king, my child,’ he murmured and the girl turned to Lannon. While she made the formal greeting Huy continued to examine her.

‘What is your name? he asked, and the girl turned back to Huy and fixed him with those solemn green eyes.

‘Tanith,’ she answered. It was the ancient name of the goddess, from the days of the old city of Carthage.

‘It is a pretty name,’ Huy nodded. ‘I have always loved it.’ And the girl smiled at him. It was a smile that took him by surprise, for it was as warm and uplifting as the dawn of Baal.

‘You are kind, Holy Father,’ she said, smiling at him and Huy Ben-Amon fell in love. He felt the bottom fall out of his stomach, and his vitals sucked downwards in a long sliding sensation. He stared at Tanith, unable to speak, feeling his cheeks flush with hot blood, searching desperately for the right word but not finding it.

Lannon broke the spell by shouting at a slave, ‘Bring a cushion.’ And they seated Tanith before the king and priests.

‘Make an oracle,’ Lannon commanded, and leaned towards her, breathing heavily and with the wine flushing his face. Tanith looked at him calmly with the faintest trace of a smile on her lips.

‘If it were within my power, I would speak an oracle for you, lord, but then there would be a matter of fee and question.’

‘What is the fee?’ Lannon demanded, he had flushed a little darker with the first stirring of anger. He was not accustomed to this treatment.

‘Holy Father, would you set the fee?’ Tanith asked of Huy and the devil took Huy.

‘One hundred fingers of fine gold,’ he spoke before he realized what he had done. It was an enormous fee, and it constituted a challenge to Lannon, daring him to back down or pay. Tanith smiled again now, a provocative dimple appeared in her cheek and she held Lannon’s scowl with a cool amused stare. Huy was suddenly aware that he had placed the girl in a position of peril. Lannon would not forgive this readily, and Huy hastened to give Lannon a graceful escape.

‘For this fee the Gry-Lion may put as many questions as he has fingers on his sword hand.’

Lannon hesitated, Huy could see that he was still angry but slightly placated by Huy’s amendment.

‘I doubt that the wisdom of a child will be worth that much, but it amuses me to test this wench,’ Lannon mumbled, looking anything but amused. He took up his wine bowl and drank deeply, then he wiped his beard and looked at Tanith.

‘I go northwards on a mission. Speak to me of the outcome,’ he ordered, and Tanith settled herself on the leather cushion, spreading her green robe about her. She lowered her head slightly, and her green eyes seemed to look inwards. There was an expectant hush on the guests now, and they watched her eagerly. Huy noticed that her cheeks paled, and her lips also rimmed with white.

‘There will be a mighty harvest,’ Tanith whispered hoarsely in a strange unnatural monotone, ‘more than the Gry-Lion expects or realizes.’

The guests stirred, glancing at each other, whispering, pondering the answer. Lannon frowned over the girl’s words.

‘Do you speak of a harvest of death?’ Lannon asked.

‘You will take death with you, but death will return with you unknown and secretly,’ Tanith replied. It was an unfavourable oracle, the young officers were restless, sobering rapidly. Huy wanted to intervene - he was regretting the whole business. He knew his king, knew he would not readily forget or forgive.

‘What must I fear?’ Lannon asked.

‘Blackness,’ Tanith answered readily.

‘How will I find death?’ Lannon was shaking with anger now, his voice guttural and his pale blue eyes deadly.

‘At the hand of a friend.’

‘Who will reign in Opet after me?’

‘He who kills the gry-lion,’ Tanith replied, and Lannon struck the wine bowl aside and it shattered on the earthen floor, the red wine splattering the feet of a waiting slave.

‘The gry-lion is finished,’ he shouted. ‘I killed the last of them - do you dare prophesy the death of house Barca?’

‘That is your sixth question, my lord.’ Tanith looked up. ‘1 cannot see the answer to it.’

‘Get her out of here,’ Lannon roared. ‘Take the witch away.’

And Huy signalled quickly for the High Priestess to take her, for a slave to replace Lannon’s wine bowl, and for another to fetch his lute. After Huy’s third song Lannon laughed again.

On the eve of the departure of the legions from Zeng-Hanno, Huy sent for the priestess and the novice Tanith. It was five days since her disastrous prophecies to Lannon Hycanus, and it had taken all Huy’s strength of will not to send for her earlier.

When she came she was fresher and lovelier than he remembered. While the priestess sat in the shade, Huy walked with Tanith upon the walls of the city, looking down on the one hand upon the streets and courtyards with the bustle of the army preparing for its march, while on the other hand they looked across the wooded hills and terraces where the slaves tended the neatly laid out vineyards and orchards.

‘I have instructed the reverend mother that you will join the convoy to Opet through the middle kingdom. You will travel with the wives of the king, and at Opet you will enter the sisterhood of Astarte - and await my return.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ Her humble tone was at odds with her saucy expression. Huy stopped and looked into her green eyes, she held his gaze easily, smiling a little.

‘Do you truly possess the sight, Tanith?’

‘I do not know, my lord.’

‘The words you spoke to the king, what did they mean?’

‘I do not know. They are words that came into my mind unbidden. 1 cannot explain them.’

Huy nodded, and paced on in silence. There was an appealing innocence about this girl, coupled with a bright mind and a sunny disposition it was impossible to resist. Huy stopped again, and she waited for him to speak.

‘Do you love the gods, Tanith?’

‘I do.’

‘Do you believe that I am their appointed one?’

‘I do, Holy Father,’ she answered with such conviction, with such transparent honesty and respect, that Huy’s reservations were set at rest. There was no doubt that she was an instrument which could be used, as long as it was used with skill.

‘What is your destiny, Tanith?’ he asked suddenly.

‘I cannot see it,’ she answered, but she hesitated then and for the first time Huy knew she was uncertain. ‘But this I know, that this - this meeting between you and me is part of that destiny.’

Huy felt his heart swell, but his voice was gruff as he replied. ‘Caution, child. You are a priestess, dedicated to the goddess. You know better than to speak like that to a man.’

Tanith dropped her eyes and colour stained her skin a dusky rose. The soft wing of dark hair swung forward against her cheek, and she pushed it away with her hand. Huy felt his soul shrivel with despair. Her presence was a physical agony, for no matter how great his need of her it could never be slaked. She belonged to the gods, forbidden, untouchable.

‘You know that,’ Huy warned her sternly. ‘Do not trifle with the gods.’

She looked up at him demurely, but Huy could have sworn there were glints of laughter and teasing mockery in the green eyes.

‘Holiness, you wrong me. I did not mean as man and maid.’

‘How then?’ demanded Huy, disappointed and with a hollow feeling in his guts at the denial.

‘We will find the answer to that when we meet at Opet, Holiness,’ she murmured and Huy knew that the months until then would pass slowly.

Lannon stood over a clay box in which was modelled a relief map of the great river area. In the east rose the Clouds of Baal, a mighty waterfall where the river fell hundreds of feet into a dark gorge and the spray from the torrent rose high into the heavens, a perpetual cloud that stood upon the plains.* From here the river flowed into a deep valley, a hot unhealthy place where rough and rocky ramparts rose on each bank, heavily forested and rich with the ivory-bearing herds. Six hundred miles farther east the river entered the territory of the Dravs, and ran through a wide alluvial plain which was inundated in the season of rain. Then at last the river joined the eastern sea through a dozen fan-shaped mouths.

* Victoria Falls

Lannon pointed out the main features of this country on the model to his generals, occasionally turning for verification to his garrison commanders who had held the river during the past year. There were twenty men in the large leather tent, and the sides were lifted to allow a dry breeze to enter - and to show the view across the wide valley below the camp. The great river itself was obscured by the tall dark green growth of trees along its bank. There was an occasional flash of reflected sunlight from the water amongst the trees. Far to the north the opposite escarpment of the valley rose in smoky blue tiers of hills.

‘Our spies have marked the main towns at which the tribes are gathered. They are mostly on the high ground, a day’s march beyond the river, and it is important that each tribe be attacked on the same day.’

He went on to assign a target to each of his commanders, a crossing place over the river, and a return route.

‘There will be no danger of attack on the return march, as long as you break their spirit on the first day. Each of the tribes is at war with the others, and they will not rally to the assistance of each other. The only way in which we can fail is if warning is carried to the barbarians and they scatter before our thrust.’

He explained the plan in detail, dwelling on the logistics of supply and routes of march, until at last Lannon set a date for the attack.

‘Twelve days from now. That will give each of your legions time to march to the crossing places, and reach the towns of the barbarians.’

From the camp on the escarpment of the valley, Huy marched the Sixth Ben-Amon to the garrison fort on the banks of the great river at Sett, and here he put the legion into camp in a forest of mopane trees which would screen them from observers on the opposite bank. Fires were forbidden during the day and were carefully screened at night and the men were kept busy building the rafts for the crossing. Heavy rains in the west had swollen the river and the ford was impassable.

Mago Tellema, the garrison commander, was a tall balding disillusioned man with the yellowish skin and eyes of the shivering sickness which was endemic along the river. He seemed pathetically glad of Huy’s company during the waiting days, and Huy found his information valuable, so they dined together every evening - Huy provided the wine out of the ample stocks he had brought from Zeng.

‘I have kept my patrols on their usual routine, as you ordered.’

‘Good,’ Huy nodded over a bowl of baked river fish and wild rice. ‘Have they noticed any increase in activity since my arrival?’

‘No, Holiness. A war party of a few hundred crossed last night and attacked one of my outposts. We drove them off readily enough, killing fifty of them.’

‘What do they gain by these raids?’

‘Weapons, and an appraisal of our strength.’

‘Is the whole border so active?’

‘No, Holy Father. But here at Sett we oppose one of the more warlike tribes, the Vendi - they are exceptional. You recall how four years ago they crossed in strength, 20,000 of them overwhelmed the garrison here and left the valley—’

‘Yes,’ Huy interrupted. ‘I was with the legions when we met them at Bhor.’

‘Ah! Of course. I remember now that your legion’s number was on the honour list.’ The commander chuckled. ‘Of that 20,000 not one returned across the river.’

‘They fought well, though - for pagans,’ Huy conceded.

‘Indeed, Holiness, they are exceptional in that respect also and in the years since then they have become more formidable.’

‘Have you seen their town?’

‘No, Holiness, but I have many spies. It is set on the first slopes of the northern escarpment, where the tributary river Kal comes down from the plateau.’

‘What is the population?’

‘I believe them to number 50,000.’

‘So large!’ Huy looked up with a mouthful of fish and stared at the commander.

‘They are a numerous tribe - not all of them live in the town. They tend large herds of cattle and are spread over a vast area.’

‘Is the town fortified?’

‘It is a large and sprawling huddle of huts, Holiness. Some of the huts are ringed with primitive palisades, but these are defence against wild animals only.’

A slave refilled Huy’s wine bowl and took away his empty dish. Huy cupped the bowl in his hands and stared moodily into the dark red liquid. His silence discomforted the commander who at last blurted, ‘Is it true that the king will arrive here on the morrow?’

‘Yes. Lannon Hycanus will march with my legion in the raid.’

‘I have never been presented to him,’ the man murmured, and Huy had a penetrating insight into the career of an elderly officer doomed to a minor outpost in the wilderness without patron or prospects.

‘I will commend you to him,’ Huy promised, and saw the pathetic gratitude in the man’s eyes.

One of the biremes that patrolled the river landed a century of axemen and archers on the far bank in the night, and before dawn they had rigged the lines across the river.

The river was 300 paces wide at this point, a dirty green flow of water between steep banks which were thickly wooded and covered with reed and dense vegetation. The rafts were carried down to the river’s edge and attached to the looped lines. The legion boarded in groups of fifty, and the elephants walked away with the line drawing the rafts smoothly across the river.

The crossing went with well-drilled precision - it was not the first time a legion had crossed the great river. There were a few minor incidents - two hoplites fell from their rafts and sank swiftly beneath the weight of their armour, one of the rafts capsized a struggling mass of men and equipment into the shallow water beside the bank but all waded to safety, a legionary entangled his arm in one of the lines and had it neatly severed below the elbow - but the crossing was completed before mid-afternoon and Lannon turned to Huy:

‘Bravely done, my Sunbird. Now explain to me your order of march.’

Huy left a cohort to hold the crossing, and to act as a base for his stores, a pile of dried meat and corn in leather bags. His legion would be tired, hungry, and perhaps hard pressed on its return and if all went as was planned, there would also be many thousands of extra mouths to feed.

Then behind a screen of light infantry and archers he began his march on the barbarian town of Kal. Here the weeks of training and hardening during the march from the Zeng-Hanno showed. For although the ground was broken and heavily forested, the legion moved swiftly in compact columns, covering the ground at a pace that pushed a steady five miles behind them every hour. Ahead of them the scouts insured that no one would carry a warning to the town. The few hundred herders and hunters and root gatherers that were met with by the scouts were dispatched with a silent shower of arrows or a swift clean axe stroke. Their bodies lay where they had fallen beside the track, and the columns trudged on past them with hardly a sidelong glance. Huy saw that they were well-formed men and women, dressed in kilts of animal skins and with tribal scars on their cheeks and breasts. Like most of the tribes from the north their skins were a very dark blueish black. Some of them had mutilated their teeth by filing them to a sharp point like those of a shark, and the men were armed with throwing spears and light axes with half-moon-shaped blades.

The legion halted after dark, and ate cold cooked meat and corn cakes from their pouches while the wine-carriers moved amongst them filling the bowls.

‘Look.’ Huy touched Lannon’s shoulder and pointed towards the northern hills. The sky glowed, as though the moon was rising from the wrong direction. It was the reflected light from thousands of cooking fires.

‘A rich harvest,’ Lannon nodded. ‘Just as the witch prophesied.’

Huy stirred uncomfortably at the mention of Tanith, but remained silent.

‘Her words have troubled me - I’ve spent many nights pondering them.’ Lannon wiped his greasy fingers and lips, before he reached for the wine bowl. ‘She preaches death and darkness and betrayal by a friend.’ He rinsed his mouth with wine and spat it on the ground before drinking.

Huy murmured, ‘She did not preach, Majesty - she replied to a question.’

But Lannon said, ‘I believe she is evil.’

‘Sire!’ protested Huy quickly.

‘Do not be misled by a pretty face, Huy.’

‘She is young, innocent,’ he began but saw Lannon leaning towards him and peering into his face, and he stopped.

‘What is this witch to you, my Sunbird?’

‘As a maid, she means nothing. How could she, she belongs to the goddess,’ Huy denied his love, and Lannon leaned back and grunted sceptically.

‘It is as well - you are wise in all things but women, my friend. You must let me guide you.’

‘You are always kind,’ Huy muttered.

‘Keep away from that one, Huy. Be warned by one who loves you, she will bring you nothing but sorrow.’

‘We have rested long enough.’ Huy stood up and settled the strap of his axe about his wrist. ‘It is time to march.’

After midnight they crested the low line of hills that formed the first slope of the escarpment, and before them spread a wide-open basin of land through which the dark river Kal meandered. The basin was moon-washed silver and blue, and the smoke from 10,000 cooking fires spread like a pale sea mist across the river, lying in layers in the still night air.

The fires had died to pin-points of dull red that speckled the town, and the huts were dark and shapeless, scattered thickly without plan or pattern, a vast agglomeration of primitive dwellings.

‘He estimated 50,000 - and he’s not far wrong.’ Huy looked out across the basin, and beside him Lannon asked:

‘How will you proceed?’ And Huy smiled in the moonlight.

‘You taught me how to hunt game, my king.’

His cohort commanders came for their orders, cloaked and helmeted and grim. Huy ordered out a thin screen of light infantry and covering bowmen to the east. During the day the scouts had captured 4,000 of the rangy little scrub cattle belonging to the Vendi.

‘Take the cattle with you. You remember Hannibal’s ruse in Italia, it will serve us as well upon the great river.’

Lannon laughed delightedly and clapped Huy’s shoulder when he had explained it. ‘Fly for me, Sunbird.’

‘Roar for me, Gry-Lion,’ Huy grinned back at him as he settled and buckled his helmet.

Silently Huy led 4,500 of his heavy infantry and axemen around to the west and lay them in a crescent shape at the edge of the forest beyond the town. Huy slept for an hour and when one of his centurions shook him awake he was stiff and cold with the night dew.

‘Stand to!’ he ordered quietly, and the word was passed from mouth to mouth. There was a stirring and a dark movement along the edge of the forest as the legionaries slung their axes and swords and bows, and took up instead the slavers’ wooden clubs.

Huy and Lannon hurried to the command position at the centre of the line, shrugging off their cloaks and flexing cold muscles.

Huy looked out across the sleeping town and the smell of it was wood smoke and cooking food and human excrement, a great sour smell of humanity that wrinkled his nostrils. The town was silent except for the lonely barking of a cur, and the petulant wail of a sleepless baby.

Huy said softly, ‘The time is now.’ And Lannon nodded. Huy turned and gave the order to one of his centurions and the man stooped over a clay fire pot and blew flame to life on the bunch of pitch-dipped rags that tipped the signal arrow. When the flame had caught and blossomed he notched the arrow and loosed it in a high arching parabola against the dark sky. From along the line the signal was repeated, orange flame soaring briefly in the darkness, but the silence was unbroken and the town slept on.

‘They have set no guards, no picket, nothing,’ Lannon remarked scornfully.

‘They are barbarians,’ Huy pointed out mildly.

‘They deserve slavery,’ Lannon said.

‘They will fare better as slaves than free men,’ Huy agreed.

‘We will dress them and feed them and show them the true gods.’

Lannon nodded. ‘We have come to lead them out of the darkness and into the sun.’ And he shifted the heavy slaving club into his right hand.

From the east, appearing suddenly out of the edge of the forest, stampeded a mass of bellowing, maddened cattle. On their horns burned torches of pitch and grass, behind them they dragged flaming dry branches and they were driven by their own terror and by a line of yelling whooping warriors. The whole scene was hellish with dust and smoke and flame. The line of cattle crashed into the town, knocking down the flimsy grass huts, leaving fire to bloom and spread in their wake, trampling the sleep-drugged naked Vendi that stumbled into their path. Behind them ran the warriors, clubbing down the survivors and leaving them lying in the hoof-churned dust.

Huy heard a steady climbing wail from the town, the sound of thousands of terrified voices. He heard the drumming of running hooves and saw the explosions of yellow flame and sparks mount into the night sky as the tinder-dry huts burned.

‘Hold your line,’ he called to the men in the darkness around him. ‘Leave no gaps in the net for the fish to slip through.’

The night was filled with movement and sound and flame. The flames spread quickly lighting the scene with a great flickering orange light, and the Vendi darted and milled and screamed as the grim line of marauders moved down upon them. The clubs rose and fell and the sound of the blows against bone was that of woodsmen working in a forest. They fell black and naked, and lay in the glaring firelight, or crawled and wriggled and wailed.

One woman with her infant clutched to her breast saw the relentless line bearing down on her, and she whirled like a doe startled from covert and ran into the tall bellowing flames of burning thatch. She burned like a torch, her hair exploding, and she screamed once and then fell scorched and unrecognizable into the flames. Huy saw it, and his blood madness cooled, congealing into revulsion and disgust.

‘Hold!’ he shouted. ‘Lighten your blows!’ And slowly out of this terrible confusion order emerged. The slave-masters were there ordering the captives into squatting lines, the infantry swept the town clear, and the flames burned themselves out, leaving only black mounds of smoking ash.

The dawn came up, a red and angry dawn - across which drifted banks of dark smoke. When Huy led the praise chant to Baal, the cries and wailing of the captives rose with the voice of the legion.

Huy hurried through the devastation ordering and organizing the retreat. Already two cohorts under the young Bakmor had started back towards the great river driving an uncounted herd of captured cattle before them. Huy guessed there might be as many as 20,000 head of the scrubby little beasts. Bakmor had Huy’s orders to swim the cattle across the river and return immediately to cover the retreat.

Now his concern was to get the slow unwieldy columns of slaves moving. The approach march that his legion had made in half a day and night would surely take two or three days on the return. The newly captured slaves must be chained, and unaccustomed to their bonds they would move but slowly, retarding the march. Every hour’s delay was dangerous, and would make the heavily encumbered legion more vulnerable to attack or reprisal.

One of his centurions accosted him, his tunic blackened with smoke and his beard singed. ‘My lord!’

‘What is it?’

‘The slaves. There are few young men amongst them.’

Huy turned to examine one of the masses of squatting black humanity. They were festooned with the light marching chains, shackled at the neck like hunting dogs in leash.

‘Yes.’ He saw it now, they were mostly women and immature youths. The slave-masters had weeded out the old and infirm, but there were very few men of warrior age and status. Huy picked a bright-looking youngster from the squatting ranks and spoke to him in the vernacular.

‘Where are the warriors?’ The youth looked startled at being addressed in his own language, but he dropped his eyes sullenly and would not answer. The centurion half drew his sword, and at the scrape of steel in the scabbard the boy glanced up fearfully.

‘A drop more blood will mean nothing,’ Huy warned him, and the boy hesitated before replying.

‘They have gone to the north to hunt the buffalo.’

‘When will they return?’ Huy demanded.

‘I do not know,’ the slave shrugged expressively, and Huy now had a more telling reason for haste. The fighting regiments of the Vendi were intact, and this towering beacon of smoke would draw them as meat draws the vultures.

‘Get them up, and moving,’ he ordered the centurion and hurried away. Lannon came out of the smoke followed by his armour-bearers and men-at-arms. One glance at his face was enough to warn Huy, for it was flushed and scowling.

‘Did you order the slave-master to spare those they reject?’

‘Yes, sire.’ Suddenly Huy was impatient with the king’s rages and tantrums, there were more important matters to occupy him now.

‘By what authority?’ Lannon demanded.

‘By the authority of a commander of a Royal Legion in the field,’ Huy answered him.

‘I commanded a burning.’

‘But not a massacre of the aged and infirm.’

‘I want the tribes to know that Lannon Hycanus passed this way.’

‘I leave witnesses to it,’ Huy told him shortly. ‘If these old ones would burden us, will they not also be a burden upon their tribe?’ Lannon drew himself up. Huy saw his rage boil over - and he took Lannon’s arm in unexpectedly conspiratorial grip.

‘Majesty, there is something of importance I must tell you.’ And before Lannon could give vent to his rage Huy had led him aside. ‘The regiments of Vendi have escaped us, they are in the field and out in battle array.’

Lannon’s rage was forgotten. ‘How close are they?’

‘I do not know - except that the longer we talk the closer they come.’

It was past noon before the long files of shuffling slaves were all tallied and moving. The slave-masters reported in to Huy’s command post, and the final count was almost 22,000 human beings.

Despite Huy’s orders to keep the column bunched and under control, the files of chained Vendi stretched over four miles and their pace was that of the slowest. At a laboured crawl like a crippled centipede, they wound through the hills and down into the bad broken ground of the valley bottom.

The first attack hit them a little after midnight on the first night. It came as a shock to Huy, for although he had taken every precaution for a night camp in enemy territory, he had not expected anything like this from the tribes. A few sentries with slit throats, a flight of arrows from ambush, even a swift rush and withdrawal at some weak spot along the line, but not a full-scale night attack which showed every evidence of planning and control, and which was pressed home with murderous intent.

Only training and discipline held his legion together before that howling torrent that hurled itself upon them from the darkness. For two hours they closed up and fought, with the trumpets blowing the standfast and the rallying cries of the centurions ringing out in the darkness.

‘On me, the Sixth.’

‘Steady, the Sixth.’

‘Hold hard, the Sixth.’

When the moon came out and lit the field, the attackers melted away into the forests and Huy could stride among his cohorts and assess his position.

The dead tribesmen were piled chest deep about the square where the cohorts had stood. In the torch light the skirmishers were finishing the enemy wounded with quick sword thrusts, while others were tending their own wounded and laying out their dead for cremation. Huy was relieved to see how small a toll the enemy had exacted from the defence, and how grievous a price they had paid themselves.

In the confusion of the battle many of the files of slaves had responded to the calls of the attackers and, with a concerted rush, had broken out of the square and escaped into the night still linked together. But there were still more than 16,000 of them howling with terror and hunger and thirst.

The legion lit its cremation fires in the dark and sang the praise chant to Baal on the march. Before the sun had been up an hour, it was clear what tactics the Vendi had decided upon for that day. Each feature along the route was contested by groups of archers and spearmen. They had to be laboriously dislodged, always falling back before the charges of Huy’s axemen, but at the same time the flanks of the column and the rear were harried and tested by repeated attacks in considerable strength.

‘I have never heard of this happening before,’ protested Lannon during a lull while he unbuckled his helmet to air his sweat-sodden curls, and wash his mouth out with wine. ‘They behave like drilled and trained troops.’

‘It is something new,’ Huy agreed as he accepted a cloth one of his armour-bearers had wetted for him. Huy’s arms and face were speckled with droplets of thrown blood, and blood had dried black and crusty on the blade and shaft of the vulture axe.

‘They have direction and purpose - I have never known tribesmen regroup after a charge has broken them. I have never known them come back after a mauling.’

Lannon spat red wine upon the ground. ‘We may have better sport than we had bargained for before the day is out,’ he laughed with anticipation and passed the wine bowl to Huy.

There was a place where the track crossed a narrow stream and then passed between two symmetrical rounded maiden’s breast hills. There was a ford at the stream and on the approaches to it sixteen spears had been set in the earth and spiked upon them were the severed heads of legionaries who had been with Bakmor’s cohorts that had gone ahead with the cattle.

‘Bakmor has not got through unscathed either,’ Huy remarked, as he watched the heads taken down and hurriedly wrapped in leather cloaks.

‘Sixteen from twelve hundred is hardly a disaster to rank with Lake Trasimene,’ Lannon remarked easily. ‘And with their grisly display they have warned us of their intention to hold the ford - weak tactics, Sunbird.’

‘Perhaps, my lord,’ Huy conceded, but he had noticed the faces of his men who had seen the ragged red throats and the dull staring eyes of the trophy heads. Their stomachs had cooled a little.

The ford was held as Lannon had predicted. It was held by a force that Huy guessed was not less than twice his own, and while they attempted to hack their way through the attacks upon the flanks and rear never let up. Twice Huy pulled his axemen and infantry out of the reddened mud of the ford to rest and reform. By now the day was baking hot and the legionaries were tiring.

Lannon had received a spear-thrust in the face which had opened his cheek to the bone, a wound that looked uglier than it really was and his beard was thick with blood and dust. A physician was stitching the wet lips of the wound closed when Huy joined the group around the king, and Lannon dismissed his anxious inquiry with a chuckle.

‘It will leave an interesting scar.’ Then without moving his head he told Huy, ‘I have discovered the solution to the mystery, Huy, and there it is!’ He pointed across the stream to the closest of the two hills. The crest was just out of random arrow range, perhaps 500 paces away. Although the slopes of the hill were forested the crest was a dome of rounded bare granite, and upon the dome stood a small group of men. They were gathered about a central figure.

Huy would always remember him as he was that fateful noon on the hilltop beside the ford. The distance did not dwarf him as it did the men about him. In some strange fashion it made his physical presence more imposing. He was a huge man, fully a head and shoulder taller than his com-panions. The sun shone on the oiled black muscles of his chest and arms, and a tall head-dress of blue heron feathers stood wind-tossed and proud upon his head. He wore a short kilt of leopard tails around his waist, but Huy did not need that to know he was a king.

‘Ah!’ he said softly, and he felt something stir in him, a cold sliding thing like an uncoiling snake. On the hilltop the Vendi king made a sweeping gesture, and then stabbed towards the ford with his heavy war spear. It was clearly the delivery of a command, and from the group around him a messenger broke away and raced down the slope of the hill carrying the order.

‘At last the tribes have found a leader,’ said Huy. ‘I should have guessed it earlier.’

‘Take him for me,’ Lannon commanded. ‘I want him. Nothing else is important. Take that man for me.’ And Huy heard a new tone in Lannon’s voice. It puzzled him and he glanced at his king. He saw it then. It was not the pain of his crudely stitched cheek that made dark shadows play in the pale blue eyes. For the first time in all the years Huy knew that Lannon was afraid.

Huy timed it carefully for the last hour before dark, for the last of the day when the shadows were long and the light uncertain. During the afternoon he skirmished at the ford in half-cohort strength, but in the thick forest on the banks of the stream he held his main strength in reserve. He let them rest during the heat of the afternoon, let them eat and drink and sharpen their blades while he made his preparations. He chose fifty of his finest, selecting them by name from the ranks and he took them well back where they would be screened from prying eyes on the heights beyond the stream.

From the bottoms of the cooking-pots they scraped the thick black soot and mixed it into a thick paste with cooking oil. There was not enough to darken the skins of fifty men so for their arms and legs they used the black mud from the river. They were all of them stripped stark naked when the slave chains were shackled about their throats, but instead of the iron pins a thin dry twig was used to close the links on every collar. They could not take shields with them, and they smeared their weapons with a thick coating of black mud to hide the twinkle and flash of naked metal, then they strapped them to their backs so they could run empty-handed.

‘You are slaves, not legionaries,’ Huy told them. ‘Run like a slave, scamper like a beaten dog.’

When they broke from the trees and ran for the river with half a century of legionaries in pursuit, they howled with terror and the carefully aimed arrows pattered around them. They reached the bank 500 paces upstream from the ford. As they blundered across, still linked together by the slave chain, the Vendi king from his vantage point saw their escape and sent two large parties of archers and spearmen to screen their crossing.

A fierce bloody little battle flared up on the river bank, and under cover of the tumult Huy got his group over the river and into the shelter of the forest on the far bank. There was a thin detachment of tribesmen in set positions amongst the trees, but by the time they realized the deception Huy’s band had dropped their chains and cut into them in a silent murderous rush.

Then they were through with nothing opposing them to the foot of the command hill. Bunched up, and hidden by the forest, Huy led them at a run around the back of the hill. They had moved fast, and he rested them here for a few minutes. The mud had washed from legs and arms during the crossing of the river and the soot and oil was streaky with sweat giving them a wild and desperate appearance.

The clamour of the fighting at the river had died away and the forest was silent and still as Huy led his band up the back slope of the hill. There were sentries posted here, but they were inattentive and did not see the weird blackened figures amongst the forest shades until it was too late.

Below the bare dome of granite Huy waited again, listening for the diversion which Lannon had promised. The distant yells and tiny scraping sound of metal from the ford were almost blanketed by the distance and the intervening bulk of the hill.

Huy said softly, ‘Now, All together.’ And they burst from the forest edge and went racing away up the granite dome. Huy led them easily, bounding ahead with the loping long-armed gait of an old bull baboon.

When he was twenty paces from the crest, the Vendi king sensed his presence and turned to face Huy. He shouted a warning to his staff, and Huy went at him like a terrier at the throat of a lion. Two of the king’s bodyguard leapt to intervene, but Huy flicked a casual axe stroke at them, rolling his wrist slightly in mid-stroke so the blade whimpered as it changed direction, killing the one guard cleanly and taking the spear arm of the other away above the elbow with a single cut. They fell aside and Huy went on to take the king.

He was a big man, perhaps the biggest Huy had ever met, and his skin was a shiny purplish black. The muscles of shoulder and arms were bunched and knotted. The sinews of his neck stood out starkly, corded into the heavy bone of his jaw. His head was round as a river-washed boulder, and without head-dress the scalp was bald and polished black.

He moved to meet Huy, sliding in on thick black legs with his leopard-skin kilts swirling, crouching slightly with the stabbing spear held underhand, the blade glistening hungrily for the softness of Huy’s belly. He moved with leopard speed, reacting instantly to Huy’s attack, and there was a sense of savage power and energy about him that checked Huy’s charge and made him whirl instinctively to the side, just as the blade of the stabbing spear slashed upwards through nothingness where Huy’s belly should have been.

The huge black man grunted as his stroke died in air, and his tawny yellow eyes fastened on Huy. He struck again and Huy hopped aside as the point hissed past him, and Huy reached out as he sprang and ran the stabbing point of the axe across the giant’s exposed ribs. The purple black skin opened and for an instant white bone showed in the depths of the wound before the rush of dark blood obscured it. The king bellowed at the sting of it, and he struck and slashed and cut at the dancing gadfly before him. Each stroke wilder, each charge more reckless as Huy goaded him, watching for his moment. It came and suddenly Huy was through the circle of the spear.

With the point of the axe he probed for the femoral artery in the giant’s groin, running the engraved steel into the tight flesh half an inch too far to the right, missing the artery but dropping the king to one knee. Huy twisted out of close contact. The axe flew high and Huy went into the kill stroke aiming at the round black skull of the kneeling king, a stroke which would split him to the chest.

‘For Baal!’ he shouted, sending the axe down from on high. Then in full stroke he changed. He never knew what impulse it was that made him check, made him twist the weapon, presenting the flat of the blade and not the edge, holding the stroke half back so that the side of the axe cracked against the king’s skull with enough force to topple him forward senseless onto his face but not enough to stove in the bone of the great round head.

Huy jumped back and with one quick glance made certain that the Vendi king’s train were all lying lifeless on the dome of granite, and his legionaries were grouped around him resting on their bloody swords. The surprise had been complete and overwhelming.

Huy turned and ran to the highest point of the hill. Naked and filthy with soot and mud he brandished his axe above his head, and his band cheered and waved their weapons also. From the ford a trumpet began to blare the advance, and immediately the call was taken up and shrilled from cohort to cohort.

Huy watched Lannon lead the first wave across the ford. The legion crashed into the leaderless tribesmen who opposed them, and drove through them with scarcely a check, splitting them and driving them back against the hills in a disorganized rabble. They had seen their king cut down and there was no spirit left in any of them.

From the hilltop Huy watched Lannon commit his last two reserve cohorts at exactly the right moment. The tribesmen broke and made a rout of it. Throwing aside their weapons they streamed back in a wailing panic-stricken mob into the bottleneck between the hills.

At that moment the handsome young Bakmor, with the two cohorts which had driven the captured cattle to the great river, marched out of the forest. He deployed the cohorts neatly across the only line of retreat open to the tribes. His return was timely indeed, and Huy watched him with grudging professional approval as he made his dispositions. As the sun touched the horizon in a splendour of red and purple the trumpets sounded the advance once again, and the slaughter and the slave-taking lasted until after midnight.

Huy crossed his legion and the host of wild slaves, using the elephant-drawn rafts at Sett. After the battle at the ford the return march had been unopposed. The regiments of the Vendi had been shattered, all their war chiefs killed or captured and Lannon was jubilant.

He told Huy, ‘My Sunbird! It was more than I asked of you. Even I did not guess that such a dangerous enemy had grown up upon my borders. It we had left him another year, only the gods know how deadly he might have become.’

‘Baal smiled upon me,’ Huy disclaimed modestly.

‘And so does Lannon Hycanus,’ Lannon assured him. ‘What was the harvest, Sunbird? Has old Rib-Addi made the accounting yet?’

‘I hope so, my lord.’

‘Send for him,’ Lannon commanded, and Rib-Addi came with his scrolls and his ink-stained fingers and his untrusting little book-keeper’s eyes. He read out the lists of cattle and slaves of each grade, every one of them carefully categorized by the slave-masters.

‘The prices will be much depressed, sire,’ Rib-Addi pointed out pessimistically. ‘For the other legions have taken a great tribute from all the tribes across the river. It will be two or three years before the markets of Opet have absorbed this mass of wealth.’

‘Nevertheless, the prize money taken by the Sixth Ben-Amon must be considerable, Rib-Addi.’

‘As my lord says.’

‘How much?’ Lannon demanded.

Rib-Addi looked alarmed, ‘I could only hazard a guess, Majesty.’

‘Guess, then,’ Lannon invited him,

‘It could be as much as 25,000 fingers - and as low as—’

‘You would smell dung in an alabaster jar of perfume,’ Lannon chided the old man. ‘Do not give me your low figure.’

‘As my lord pleases.’ Rib-Addi bowed, and Lannon turned to Huy and clasped his shoulder.

‘Your share is one part in a hundred, Sunbird. Two hundred and fifty fingers - you are a rich man at last! How does it feel?’

‘It does not sicken me,’ Huy grinned at him, and Lannon laughed delightedly as he turned back to Rib-Addi.

‘Write in your book, old man. Write that Lannon Hycanus sets aside half of his share of the prize. He makes it over as an award to the legion commander, Huy Ben-Amon, for his conduct of the campaign.’

‘My lord, that is one part in twenty,’ Rib-Addi protested vehemently. ‘It is an award of over 1,000 fingers!’

‘I have learned my figures also,’ Lannon assured him, and the book-keeper might have protested further, but he saw Lannon’s expression.

‘It shall be written,’ he mumbled, and Huy came to kneel before his king in gratitude.

‘Up!’ Lannon ordered him, smiling. ‘Do not grovel for me, old friend.’ And Huy went to stand beside Lannon’s stool, as the king called each of the officers who had acted with distinction and made the awards.

Huy was lost in a trance of avarice, hardly able to credit his fortune. He was rich - rich! He must sacrifice to the gods this very day. A white bull, at the least. As Rib-Addi had pointed out, the market was flooded and Huy would be able to get one cheaply. Then he remembered that he no longer had to stint.

He could afford any luxury he had ever coveted, and still have enough over for an estate on the terraces of Zeng, a share in one of Habbakuk-Lal’s trading galleys. A seat on one of the gold-mining syndicates, a secure income for life. No more patches in his tunics, no more bullying his household to cut down on the consumption of meat, no more of the cheap sour wines from the harbour taverns. And then his mind jumped, no more reliance on Lannon’s hospitality and on the goodwill of his young slave girls. He would have one of his own - no, damn it, two - three! Young and pretty and pliant. He felt his body stir. He could afford a wife now, even the daughters of the noble houses might turn a blind eye to his back when dazzled by such a pile of the golden metal.

Then suddenly he remembered Tanith, and the phantom slave girls and wives faded back into the mists of his imagining. His spirits plunged sickeningly. The priestesses of Astarte were dedicated to the goddess, they could never marry. Suddenly Huy did not feel as rich as he had a moment before.

‘Do you not hear your king when he speaks?’ Lannon demanded, and Huy started guiltily.

‘My lord, I was dreaming. Forgive me.’

‘It is no longer necessary to dream,’ Lannon told him.

‘What was it the Gry-Lion asked?’

‘I said we should send for the barbarian - we can deal with him before the legion assembles.’

Huy looked around at his cohorts drawn up in an open square before the leather awning under which Lannon sat. The legions’ standards glittered in the sunlight, and the officers stood at ease before their men. They waited expectantly, and Huy sighed quietly.

‘As the Gry-Lion wishes.’

‘Order it so,’ Lannon commanded.

They had chained him at wrists and ankles, as well as at the throat. The slave-masters could pick a dangerous one at a glance, and two of them held him in leash by the chains from his throat collar.

He was as big as Huy remembered, and his skin even darker, but he was a young man. This came as a shock to Huy, he had thought of him as being in his prime years but this was an illusion. The man’s physical bulk and his commanding presence made him older than his years.

Huy saw how he had fought against his bonds, tearing his own flesh, smearing the skin on the unyielding iron shackles, and the wound in his groin had been crudely dressed with leaves and bark. There were the first watery yellow discharges of putrefication soiling the dressing, and the flesh around it looked hard and swollen. Although he limped, although the chains jangled mockingly at every pace, and although the slave-masters braced against him as though he were a captured animal, there was no mistaking that he was a king. He stood before Lannon and lowered his head slightly on the thick sinewed neck. His eyes were ferocious, even the whites were smoking yellow and covered with a fine lacework of blood vessels, and he stared at his captors with a hatred that was a palpable thing.

‘You captured this - this great black beast, Huy?’ Lannon returned the giant’s stare. ‘Without help, you took him?’ Lannon shook his head with wonder and turned to Huy, but Huy was watching the Vendi king.

‘What is your name?’ Huy asked softly, and the big round head swivelled towards him, the fierce eyes held his

‘How do you have the tongue of Vendi?’

‘I have many tongues,’ Huy assured him. ‘Who are you?’

‘Manatassi, King of the Vendi,’ And Huy translated for Lannon.

‘Tell him he is king no longer,’ Lannon snapped, and Manatassi shrugged and smiled. His smile was a frightening thing for although the thick purple lips drew back to expose strong white teeth, yet his eyes still smoked with hatred.

‘Fifty thousand warriors of Vendi call me king still,’ he answered.

‘A slave king of a slave people,’ Lannon laughed, and then to Huy. ‘What of him, Huy? Is he not a dangerous enemy? Can we afford to let him live?’

Huy tore his gaze from the slave king and considered the question, trying to think logically but finding it difficult, Huy had conceived a sudden but powerful proprietary interest in Manatassi. He was impressed with the man’s power and presence, with the military skills he had displayed, with the cunning and cleverness and the strange smouldering depths of him. Huy had taken him, he could claim him, even from Lannon, and he was strongly tempted to do so now, for he sensed that here was some extraordinary opportunity. To take this man and educate him, civilize him - what might be made of him! He felt an excitement as a new idea tried to struggle to the surface of his mind.

‘I think not,’ Lannon answered himself. ‘From the first moment I saw him, on the hill above the ford, I knew he was dangerous. Deadly dangerous. I do not think we can let him live, Huy. He would make a fine messenger to the gods. We will dedicate him to Baal and send him as a messenger to express our gratitude for the outcome of the campaign.’

‘My lord,’ Huy dropped his voice for Lannon alone, ‘I have a feeling about this man. I feel I could enlighten him, teach him the true gods. He is young, my lord, I could work upon him, and when we are ready we could return him to his people.’

‘Have the birds picked out your brain?’ Lannon looked at Huy in astonishment. ‘Why should we return him to his people, when we have spent so much effort on capturing him?’

‘We could use him as an ally then.’ Huy was trying desperately to get his idea over. ‘Through him we could make a treaty with the tribes. We could win him over and use him to secure our northern borders.’

‘Treaties with barbarians!’ Lannon was angry now. ‘What nonsense is this? Secure our northern borders, you say? One thing, and one thing only will secure our northern borders, and that is a sharp sword in a strong hand.’

‘My lord, please hear me out.’

‘No, Huy. I will have no more of it. He must die - and quickly.’ Lannon stood up. ‘Tonight at sunset. Prepare to send him.’ And Lannon strode away.

‘Dismiss the legion,’ Huy ordered his commanders, and nodded to the slave-masters to lead the captive away. But Manatassi stepped forward dragging the slave-masters with him on his chains.

‘High born!’ Manatassi called Huy, who turned back to him with surprise. He had not expected a title of respect.

‘What is it?’ Huy looked at him.

‘Is it death?’ Manatassi asked, and Huy nodded.

‘It is death,’ he admitted.

‘But you argued for me?’ Manatassi insisted, and again Huy nodded.

‘Why?’ demanded the slave king, and Huy could not answer. He spread his hands, a gesture of weariness and incomprehension.

Twice already,‘ the slave king said. ’First you turned the blade which should have killed, and now you speak for me. Why?‘

‘I do not know. I cannot explain.’

‘You feel the bond - the bond between us,’ Manatassi declared, and his voice sank low, rumbling and soft. ‘The bond of the spirits. You felt it.’

‘No.’ Huy shook his head, and hurried away to his tent. He worked on his scrolls for most of the afternoon, recording the campaign, describing the burning and the battle at the ford, listing the battle honours and the slaves taken, the booty and the glory - but he could not bring himself to describe Manatassi. The man would soon be dead, let his memory die with him, let it not linger on to haunt the living. A phrase that Lannon had used stuck in his mind, ‘the black beast’, and he used it as the only reference to the doomed slave king.

He ate the noon meal with Bakmor and a few others of his young officers, but his mood infected them all and the meal was awkward, the conversation trivial and stilted. Afterwards Huy spent an hour with his adjutant and quartermaster ordering the legion’s affairs, then he worked with the axe until his sweat ran down his body in streams. He scraped and oiled and changed into fresh robes for the sacrifice, and went to Lannon’s tent. Lannon was in conference, a group of his advisers and officials sitting in a half-circle around him on the skins and cushions. Lannon looked up and smiled and called Huy to him.

‘Sit by me, my Sunbird. There is something here on which I would value your thoughts.’ And Huy sat and listened to Lannon directing the affairs of the four kingdoms with a quick and confident logic. He made decisions which would have tormented Huy for days, and he made them easily, without doubts or hesitations. Then he dismissed his court, and turned to Huy.

‘A bowl of wine with me, Huy. It will be many days before we have the chance again, for in the morning I leave you,’

‘Whither, my lord?’

‘I return to Opet, but at speed. I will leave you and your slaves and herds to make the best of it.’

They drank together, exchanging the seemingly easy desultory talk of old friends, but Huy was manoeuvring for an opening to speak of Manatassi, and Lannon was deftly denying it to him. At last Huy in desperation approached the subject directly.

‘The Vendi king, my lord.’ And he got no further, for Lannon slammed the wine bowl down so that it cracked and a ruby gush of the lees spurted onto the furs on which they sat.

‘You presume on friendship. I have ordered his death. Except for the axe stroke the matter is settled.’

‘I believe it is a mistake.’

‘To let him live will be a greater mistake.’

‘My lord—’

‘Enough, Huy! Enough, I say! Go out now and send him.’

In the sunset they brought the Vendi king to a clear place on the river bank below the garrison walls of Sett. He was dressed in a cloak of leather, worked with the symbols of Baal, and he wore the symbolical chains of the sacrifice. Huy stood with the priests and nobles, and when they led the doomed king forward his eyes fastened on Huy’s. Those terrible yellow eyes seemed almost to hook into his flesh, seemed to draw Huy’s soul out through his eye sockets.

Huy began the ritual, chanting the offertory, making the obeisance to the flaming god image in the western sky and all the while he could feel those eyes eating into the core of his existence.

Huy’s assistant offered him the vulture axe, polished and glinting red and gold in the last rays of the sunset. Huy went to where Manatassi stood, and looked up at him.

The slave-masters stepped forward and lifted the cloak from the shoulders of the sacrifice. Except for the golden chains he was naked and magnificent. They had removed the raw-hide sandals from his feet. The slave-masters waited with the chains in their hands, at Huy’s signal they would jerk the sacrifice off his feet and stretch him out upon the ground. His neck drawn out for the axe blade.

Huy hesitated, unable to force himself to give the order, held fascinated by those fierce yellow eyes. With an effort he tore his gaze free and looked downwards. He had started to give the signal, but his hand froze. He was staring at Mana-tassi’s bare feet.

Around him the watchers stirred restlessly, glancing towards the horizon where the sun was rapidly sliding below the trees. Soon it would be too late.

Still Huy stared at Manatassi’s feet.

‘The sun goes, Priest. Strike!’ Lannon called abruptly, angrily in the silence and the sound of his voice seemed to arouse Huy. He turned to Lannon.

‘My lord, there is something you must see.’

‘The sun is going,’ Lannon called impatiently.

‘You must see it,’ Huy insisted, and Lannon strode forward to stand beside him.

‘Look!’ Huy pointed at the Vendi king’s feet, and Lannon frowned on a quick intake of breath.

Manatassi’s feet were monstrously deformed, deeply divided between the toes so that they resembled the claws of some preternatural bird. Involuntarily Lannon stepped backwards, making the full-handed sun sign to avert evil.

‘He is bird-footed,’ Huy said, ‘he has the feet of the sacred Sunbird of Baal.’ And there was a rustle and murmur from the watchers. They craned forward with a ghoulish, superstitious curiosity.

Huy raised his voice. ‘I declare this man god-marked. He is favoured by the gods - and cannot be sent as a messenger.’

As he spoke the sun dropped below the rim of the world and there was a chill and a dankness in the air.

Lannon was in a towering, shaking rage that paled his lips and face so that the black clotted scab of his wound stood out clearly on his cheek.

‘You defied me!’ he said it softly, but in a voice that trembled with his rage.

‘He is god-marked!’ Huy protested.

‘Do not try to hide behind your gods, Priest. You and I both know that many of Baal’s decisions are made by Huy Ben-Amon, for Huy Ben-Amon.’

‘Majesty,’ Huy gasped at the accusation, at the dreadful blasphemy of it.

‘You defied me,’ Lannon repeated. ‘You think to place this barbarian beyond my reach, you aspire to play the game of power and politics with me.’

‘It is not true, my lord. I would not dare.’

‘You would dare, Priest. You would dare to steal the teeth from the mouth of the living Gry-Lion, it the fancy came upon you.’

‘My lord, I am your true, your most loyal—’

‘Tread lightly, Priest. I warn you. You fly high in the tour kingdoms, but remember always that you do so by my favour alone.’

‘I know this well.’

‘I who exalted you, have it in my power to throw you down as readily.’

‘I know this also, my lord,’ said Huy humbly.

‘Then give me this barbarian,’ Lannon demanded, and Huy looked up at him with an expression of deep regret.

‘He is not mine to give, my lord. He belongs to the gods.’

Lannon let out a bellow of frustrated rage, and snatched up a heavy amphora of wine. He hurled it at Huy’s head, and Huy ducked nimbly. The amphora slapped into the leather side of the tent, cushioning the impact and it dropped to the ground without breaking, wine gurgled from the mouth and soaked into the dry earth.

Lannon was on his feet now, towering over Huy, holding out towards him fists bunched into bony clubs, the muscles in his forearms knotted and ridged with exasperation. He held those fists under Huy’s nose, and his eyes were pale glittering blue and deadly, the thick red-golden ringlets danced on his shoulders as he shook with the tempests of his rage.

‘Go!’ he said in a strangled voice. ‘Go quickly - before -before I—’

Huy did not wait to hear the rest of it.

Lannon Hycanus marched from Sett with a bodyguard of 200 men, and Huy watched him go from the walls of the garrison. He felt a chill of apprehension, vulnerable now and lonely without the king’s favour.

Huy watched the small travelling party march out between the ranks of the legion, and saw that Lannon wore only a light tunic and that he was bareheaded in the early morning sunlight, his hair shining like a beacon fire. His armour-bearers followed him with helmet and breastplate, bow and sword and javelins. At Lannon’s heels followed the little pygmy hunt-master, Xhai the bushman; he was attentive as a shadow to the king.

The legion cheered Lannon away, their voices ringing from the escarpment of the valley, and Lannon moved through the gates. He stood taller than those that surrounded him. smiling and proud and beautiful.

He looked up and saw Huy on the wall, and the smile changed to a quick fierce scowl; ignoring Huy’s hesitant salute he marched out through the gates and took the road that ran southwards into the pass, and over the hills to the middle kingdom.

Huy watched until the forest hid him from sight, and then he turned away, feeling very alone. He went down to where the slave king lay dying on a bed of dry straw in a corner of Huy’s own tent.

In the rising heat of the morning the smell of the wound was the rank, fetid odour of fever swamps and things long dead.

One of the old slave women was bathing his body, trying to lower the fever. She looked up as Huy entered and answered his query with a shake of her head. Huy squatted beside the pallet, and touched the slave king’s skin. It was burning hot and dry, and Manatassi moaned in delirium.

‘Send for a slave-master,’ Huy ordered irritably, ‘Have him strike away these chains.’

It was amazing to watch the fever eat away the flesh from that huge black frame, to see the bone appear beneath the skin, to watch the face collapse, and the skin change colour from shiny purple black to dry dusty grey,

The wound in his groin swelled up hot and hard, with a crusty evil-smelling scab from which a watery greenish-yellow fluid wept slowly. Each hour the slave king’s hold on life seemed to slacken, his body grew hotter, the wound swelled to the size of a man’s bunched fist.

In the noon of the second day Huy left the camp alone and climbed to a high place upon the escarpment where he could be alone with his god. Here in the valley of the great river the sun-god’s presence seemed all-pervading and his usually warm benevolent countenance was oppressive. It seemed to fill the entire sky, and to beat down upon the earth like the hammer of a smith upon the anvil.

Huy sang the prayer of approach, but he did so in a perfunctory fashion, gabbling out the last lines, for Huy was very angry with his gods, and he wanted them to be aware of his displeasure.

‘Great Baal,’ he omitted the more flowery titles, and came swiftly to the main body of his protest, ‘following your evident wishes, I have saved this one who bears your marks. Although I do not wish to complain, nor to question your motives, yet you should know that this has been no easy task. I have made serious sacrifices. I have weakened the position of the High Priest of Baal in the king’s favour - I think not of myself, naturally, but only of my influence as your agent and servant. What weakens me, weakens the worship of the gods.’ Huy said this with relish, that must surely catch their attention, and Huy was delighted with it. He felt it was entirely justified, it was high time that certain things were said and that the reciprocal duties of loyalty were stated.

‘You know of old that no command of yours is too difficult of execution, no burden you place upon me but I shoulder it cheerfully, for always I have been secure in the certainty of your wisdom and purpose.’

Huy paused for breath, and thought. He was angry, but he must not let anger run away with his tongue. He had offended the king, best not offend the gods also. Quickly he moderated his closing address.

‘However, in the matter of this marked barbarian I have no such certainty. I have saved him at great cost - to what purpose? Is it your intention that he must now die?’ Huy paused again, letting his point sink in.

‘I ask you now, most humbly,’ Huy spread a drop of honey, ‘most humbly, to make your intentions plain to your always attentive and obedient servant.’

Huy paused once more, should he dare the use of stronger terms? He decided against it, and instead spread both hands in the sun sign and sang the praise of Baal, with all the skill and beauty at his command. The sound of his voice shimmering and aching sweet in the breathless heat-hush of the wilderness was enough to make the gods weep, and when the last pure note had died upon the heated air Huy went down to the camp and with a bronze razor he lanced the grotesque swelling in the slave king’s loin. Manatassi screamed with pain even in his delirium, and the poison gushed out thick yellow and stinking. Huy poulticed the open wound with boiled corn wrapped in a linen cloth, scalding hot to drain the poisons.

By evening the fever had passed, and Manatassi lay in exhausted, but natural sleep. Huy stood over him smiling and nodding happily. He felt that he had won this wasted giant, wrested him from death’s dark jaws with prayer and endeavour. He experienced a proud warmth of ownership and when the old slave crone brought him a brimming bowl of good Zeng wine, Huy lifted it in a salute to the sleeping giant.

‘The gods have given you to me. You are mine. You live under my protection now, and I pledge it to you,’ And he drained the bowl.

The weakness of his body smothered him, pressing him down on the hard mattress of straw. It was an effort to lift head or hand, and he hated his body that had failed him now. He rolled his head slowly and opened his eyes.

Across the tent, on a mat of woven reeds sat the strange little man. Manatassi watched him with a quick flaring of interest. He was stooped over a roll of the strange glowing metal that had been beaten out into a thin pliable length, and with a pointed knife he was scratching and cutting marks into the soft surface. He spent many hours of each day at this unusual activity. Manatassi watched him, noticing the quick nervous birdlike movements of head and hands that set the golden earrings jangling and the thick black plaits of hair dangling down his back.

The head seemed too large for the oddly hunched body, and the legs and arms were long and thick and brutal-looking, dark hair grew on the forearms and the back of the long tapered hands - and Manatassi remembered the speed and strength of that body in battle. He lifted his head slightly and glanced down at the linen bandages which swathed his lower body.

At the movement Huy was on his feet in one swift movement, and he came to the pallet and stooped over him, smiling.

Huy said, ‘You sleep like a breastfed baby.’ And Manatassi looked up at him, wondering that a man could speak such a deadly insult to the paramount king of Vendi - and smile as he said it.

‘Aia, bring food,’ Huy shouted for the old slave woman, and settled down on a cushion beside Manatassi’s couch. While Manatassi ate with huge appetite he listened with only a small part of his attention to a ridiculous description of the moon as a white-faced woman. He wondered that such a skilled warrior could be so naive. It was only necessary to look at the moon to see that it was a cake of ground corn, and as the Mitasi-Mitasi the one great god devoured it, so the shape of his bite could clearly be seen cut from the round cake.

‘Do you understand this?’ Huy asked with deep concern, and Manatassi answered readily, ‘I understand, high-born.’

‘You believe it?’ Huy insisted.

I believe it.‘ Manatassi gave the answer which he knew would please, and Huy nodded happily. His efforts to teach the slave king were most rewarding. He had explained the theory of symbolic representation very carefully, showing Manatassi that the moon was not Astarte but her symbol, her coin, her sign and promise. He had explained the waning and waxing as the symbolic subjugation of the female to the male, repeated in the human female by the periodic moon-sickness.

‘Now, the great god Baal,’ Huy said, and Manatassi sighed inwardly. He knew what was coming. This strange person would now talk about the hole in the sky through which Mitasi-Mitasi made his entrances and exits. He would try to make Manatassi believe that this was a man with a flowing red beard. What a contradictory people they were, these pale ghost-like beings. On the one hand they had weapons and clothes and wonderful possessions and almost magical skills in civil and military matters. He had seen them fight and work, and it had amazed him. Yet these same people could not recognize truths that even the unweaned infants of his tribe understood completely.

Manatassi’s first conscious thoughts when he had emerged from the hot mists of fever had been of escape. But now, forced by his weakness into the role of observer, he had time to reconstruct his plans. He was safe here, this hunch-backed manikin wielded some strange power, and he was under its protection. He knew this now. No one would touch him as long as his new master held his shield over him.

The other thing he knew was that there was much to learn here. If he could acquire the skills and knowledge of this people, he would be armed a thousand times. He would be the greatest war chief the tribes had ever known. They had used these skills to defeat him, he would defeat them with the same skills that he learned from them.

‘Do you understand?’ Huy asked earnestly. ‘Do you understand that Baal is the master of the whole of heaven and earth?’

‘I understand,’ said Manatassi.

‘Do you accept Astarte and great Baal as gods?’

‘I accept them,’ Manatassi agreed, and Huy looked very pleased.

‘They have placed their mark upon you. It is right that you should be dedicated to their service. When we reach the city I will perform the ceremony in the temple of great Baal. I have chosen a god-name for you - you will no longer use the old style.’

‘As you wish, high-born.’

‘From henceforth you will be called Timon.’

‘Timon,’ the slave king tested the sound of it.

‘He was the priest-warrior in the reign of the fifth Gry-Lion. A great man.’

Timon nodded, not understanding but content to watch and wait and learn.

‘High-born,’ he asked softly, ‘the marks you scratch upon the yellow metal - what are they?’

Huy jumped up and fetched the golden scroll to the couch.

‘This is how we store words and stories and ideas.’ He plunged into an explanation of the writing process, and was rewarded by Timon’s quick grasp of the principle of the phonetic alphabet.

On a scrap of leather he wrote Timon’s name in sooty black ink, and in unison they spelled it out aloud, Timon laughing delightedly at his first achievement.

‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘there is much to learn here - and so little time.’

Across the clay box Caius Terentius Varro, Consul of Rome, fought once more, pressing his legions into Hannibal’s soft centre. The centre gave, with the sucky reluctance of dough, the Spaniards and Gauls there withdrew at Hannibal’s design.

‘Do you see it, Timon? The beauty of it, the sheer genius of it!’ Huy called excitedly, speaking in Punic now, manipulating the counters.

‘And where was Marhabal now?’ Timon demanded as excitedly in the same language. After two years his Punic was fluent, with only the dragging vowels marring its perfection.

‘He was here,’ Huy touched the cavalry counters, ‘holding his horse on a short rein.’ Timon understood a horse to be a swift animal like a zebra on whose back armed men rode.

‘Varro is entangled now?’ Timon asked.

‘Yes! Yes! Hannibal has crumpled his front and enveloped him - then what does he do, Timon?’

‘The reserves?’ Timon guessed.

‘Yes! You have it! The Numidians and African reserves.’ Huy was hopping up and down in his agitation. ‘With the timing of the great master, he unleashes them. Taking Varro in the flanks, squeezing him in a vice, packing his ranks so they cannot manoeuvre nor wield their weapons. Then what, Timon, what then?’

‘The cavalry?’

‘Ah! The cavalry - Marhabal! The faithful brother. The master of horse, who has waited all that long day. Go! cries Hannibal.’ Huy threw his arm in a wide gesture. ‘Go! My brother, ride with your wild Iberians! They crash into them, Timon. It is the moment, the exact moment. Five minutes earlier it is too soon - five minutes later and it is too late. Timing! Timing! The talent of the great military commander, timing! Of the statesman, the lover, the businessman, the merchant. The right action, at the right time.’

‘And the result, high-born, what was the result?’ Timon pleaded, in an agony of suspense. ‘Was it victory?’

‘Victory?’ Huy asked. ‘Yes, Timon. It was victory. Victory and massacre. Eight legions of vaunting Rome wiped out to the man, two entire consular armies.’

‘Eight legions, high-born.’ Timon marvelled. ‘Forty-eight thousand men in a single battle?’

‘More than that, Timon. The auxiliaries were lost also. Sixty thousand men!’ Huy swept his hand across the board, exterminating the Roman legions. ‘We won the battles, Timon, but they won the wars. Three of them. Three bloody wars, that crushed us—’ Huy broke off. His voice choking. He turned away quickly and went to the water jug. Timon hurried across and held the basin for him while Huy washed his hands and combed his beard. ‘That brings us to the end of our study of Hannibal’s campaigns, Timon. I kept the battle of Cannae for the last.’

‘Who will we study next, high-born?’

‘The one who Hannibal himself rated the most skilful general of all history.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Alexander III,’ Huy said, ‘King of Macedonia, who smashed the Persian Empire - whom the oracle at Delphi proclaimed invincible, and men called the Great.’

Timon held Huy’s cloak for him, and Huy fastened the clasp as he left the precincts of the temple college through the small gate in the inner wall. Timon followed a pace behind him, wearing the short blue tunic of Huy’s household with a light gold chain, dagger and purse belting his waist, the mark of high trust as a body slave. He walked a pace behind Huy’s left shoulder, so as not to mask his master’s sword arm, and he kept his hand on the dagger.

‘High-born, the manner in which Hannibal invested Varro?’

‘Yes?’ Huy encouraged him.

‘Could he not have advanced his flanks, and held his centre firm?’

‘It is the difference between defence and offence,’ Huy explained, and they plunged into the discussion of battle tactics and strategy until they left the main gate in the outer wall of the temple area. From here any conversation was impossible, for the crowds spotted this strange couple. Giant black slave and diminutive gnomelike master. They cheered Huy, crowding around him to touch his arm in greeting, to listen to his banter and perhaps receive an alms coin from the purse on Timon’s belt.

Huy loved his popularity. He smiled and joked and pushed his way gently through the press. A successful general - there had been two other campaigns since the great slave-taking - a well-beloved priest, a noted wit and songwriter, and a rich philanthropist (Huy’s investments had prospered exceedingly in the last two years), he was the object of popular adulation throughout the city.

They crossed the market-place with its fascinating smells and sights and sounds of hides and humanity, of spices and open sewers. On one of the slave blocks was a light-skinned girl of mixed Yuye blood, and the auctioneer spotted Huy in the crowd and called out to him.

‘My lord, a work of art for you. A statue in yellow ivory,’ opening the girl’s cloak to display her body.

Huy laughed and waved a hand in refusal. They moved along the stone jetty at the lakeside where the ships lay with stern almost touching stern, their hatches open and a boiling of stevedores running over them, loading and unloading the merchandise. From the taverns and wineshops flanking the jetty came the sour stench of cheap wine and gusts of drunken laughter. The street girls beckoned from the narrow lanes between the shops. The uncertain light of dusk softened their raddled features and hectic painted cheeks and lips - Huy wondered what solace a man could find with the likes of them.

Beyond the bustle of the harbour area lay the town houses of the noble families and rich merchants, each protected by the high mud outer wall and a heavy carved wooden gate. Huy’s new residence was one of the least pretentious of these, with the entrance off a narrow walled lane, and a view from the flat roof over the lake.

Once through the gate Huy shed his sword and cloak and handed them to Timon with a sigh of pleasure at the moment of homecoming, and he went through into the paved central courtyard.

The princes and princesses were waiting tor him, fourteen of them, headed by the twins, Helanca and Imilce. The two of them had grown in the past years, and they were stranded now in that awkward period between girlhood and womanhood. Too young to giggle, yet too old to greet Huy with a kiss.

There were no such inhibitions upon the younger members of house Barca, and they swarmed forward to engulf Huy. The religious instruction of the children of the royal house was a duty Huy had imposed upon himself, and despite the estrangement between king and priest, Lannon had not interfered with this arrangement. He had not sanctioned it, but he had not forbidden it. Huy led his students through into the airy living-room of the house.

In the courtyard one of the royal nursemaids waited until her charges had followed the priest before she turned and her eyes sought those of Timon. She was a tall girl with strong shoulders, long-waisted and with fruitful hips. Her legs also were straight and strong, but her hands were narrow and pink-palmed and delicately shaped. She wore her hair oiled and dressed in the manner of the Vendi, for she was of Timon’s tribe. Taken in the great raid, she was not slave born, not of the humble dependent breed that had known nothing but captivity. There was a fierce spirit in her to match Timon’s.

Her skin was a shade lighter than his, her face was round, moon-shaped, her nose flat and broad, her lips full and pouting, but her teeth were small and even, and very white when she smiled at Timon.

Timon inclined his head sharply in a command, and Sellene the slave girl nodded in acknowledgement. When Timon left the courtyard and went through the kitchens into the slave quarters she followed him.

He was waiting for her in his own tiny room with its single pallet of reed mat and furs. She went to him without hesitation, and lay against the great hard muscles of his chest and belly and thighs. Her round breasts jutting through the purple tunic of house Barca pressed against Timon.

They held their faces together, sniffing softly but eagerly at each other’s eyes and mouth and nostrils, clinging to each other in their need and wanting.

‘When I hold you, then once again I am King of Vendi, and no slave dog,’ Timon whispered, and the girl groaned against him with her love.

With gentle hands that could crush the life from a man Timon loosened her tunic and carried her to the pallet. He laid her upon the bed, and as he came over her he said, ‘You shall be the first of all my wives. You shall be my queen and the mother of my sons.’

‘When shall it be?’ she asked him and her voice shook with the emotions locked within her.

‘Soon,’ he promised. ‘Very soon now. I have what I came for, and I will take you back beyond the river. I shall be the greatest king the tribes have ever known, and you shall be my queen.’

‘I believe you,’ whispered Sellene.

‘My royal lords and fair ladies.’ The children squealed with glee, it was one of their jokes when Huy addressed them that way. ‘Today I have a special treat for you!’ Again pandemonium broke out. Huy’s treats were usually something special indeed.

‘What is it?’ Imilce demanded breathlessly.

‘This evening you will meet the oracle of Opet,’ Huy announced, and the uproar subsided swiftly. The small ones not understanding but none the less infected by the solemnity of their elders. The bigger children had heard of the oracle, their nurses often frightened them into obedience with the name. Now that they were about to meet this mythical creature the atmosphere was charged with tension. They were all of them suffering from an onset of the creeps and ghostlies.

Anna spoke for all of them when she asked in a very subdued voice, ‘She won’t eat us, will she?’

When Tanith came she seated herself amongst them, and threw the hood of her cloak back from her face. She smiled at the children, and said softly, ‘I am going to tell you a story.’ The smile and the promise were enough to ease the tension and they edged in closer to her. ‘It’s the story of the marriage of the great god Baal to the goddess Astarte.’

Tanith began the tale from religious mythology which was the basis of the Festival of the Fruitful Earth, a festival celebrated every five years. This year of Opet 538 was the 106th ceremony since the founding of the city, and the following day would begin the festivities that would last for ten days.

Tanith held her young audience enthralled, speaking in the compelling voice which Huy had trained so carefully, using the mannerisms and gestures he had taught her. Huy watched her with an unusual mixture of professional appraisal and the adulation of a besotted lover.

In two years she had lost the last traces of gawkiness and uncertainty, and although she was not yet twenty years of age, there was an inner calm, a serenity of mind and expression, that befitted her role of seeress and occult adviser to a nation. No matter that her pronouncements were carefully coached and rehearsed by Huy Ben-Amon, it was she that made the delivery, and made it convincingly. Much of Huy’s material success in the last two years stemmed from the questions and requests for guidance addressed to Tanith by the rich merchants and trading syndicates of Opet - and Tanith’s replies. The supplicants were usually well satisfied with Tanith’s advice, though it was always couched in terms of ambiguity to insure against recriminations. Did it matter that Huy Ben-Amon was also well satisfied?

In the same way Huy, despite his loss of the king’s ear, kept a guiding hand on the rudder of the ship of state. Huy was certain that Lannon Hycanus was fully aware of the ultimate source of the advice and guidance which he received from Tanith. In any event, Lannon visited the oracle regularly in her shrine in the grotto beside the silent green pool of Astarte.

On the morrow Lannon’s visit to the oracle would be his first official act that would signal the commencement of the Festival of the Fruitful Earth. This was the true reason why Huy had summoned Tanith to his residence. He must brief her carefully on the replies she would make to the king’s queries. Huy knew with a high degree of accuracy what these would be, for his informers were close to the king and again Huy guessed that Lannon intentionally leaked his questions in advance, certain that they would reach Huy and that the replies would come through the oracle.

Thinking of Lannon always brought on a mood of deep melancholy. Two years Huy had been without the solace of Lannon’s smile and hand clasp and companionship, and during that time the sharp edge of his loss had not blunted but grown keener. He would wait for hours for a passing glimpse of his old friend, he would pester others for accounts of the banquets at the palace to which he was not invited. On each anniversary of the king’s birth, and also on his throne day Huy had composed a sonnet and sent it with a handsome gift to the palace. The gift had been unacknowledged and the sonnet unsung - as far as he knew.

Huy tore himself out of this sad mood, and looked instead at his love. The children had crowded her now, silent and big-eyed and intent. Four-year-old Hannibal, named after his illustrious ancestor, had crawled into Tanith’s lap and was sucking his thumb as he stared up into her face.

Tanith’s mask of solemnity had slipped a little, with these children she was childlike, her expression animated and her voice excited. Seeing her thus seemed to add a new dimension to Huy’s feelings for her, and his heart swelled in his chest until it seemed his chest must burst. How much longer must he wait, he wondered, and for what? If it had taken two long carefully planned years to win her confidence, how much longer to win her heart, and having won it what could he hope for - for she was dedicated to the goddess and could never belong to mortal man.

Tanith’s story ended, and the children exclaimed and clamoured for more, besieging her with demands and entreaties and bribery kisses - but Huy feigned outrage, and scolded them while they laughed and clapped their hands with delight. He shouted for the nursemaids and they came -among them that tall, brooding, fiery woman who always made Huy feel disquiet when she looked at him from those unfathomably dark eyes.

He said to her, ‘Sellene, darkness falls, tell Timon to carry a lamp for you to the palace gate.’ And she acknowledged him with an inclination of the head, showing no gratitude at the order nor resentment either.

After the children had gone they ate the evening meal, the three of them, Tanith, Huy and Aina the ancient priestess who was Tanith’s chaperone. Huy had selected her for two good reasons. She was half blind and completely deaf. Huy had tested her by making obscene gestures at her from a range of twenty paces. Aina had shown no reaction, nor had she when Huy crept up behind her and shouted a rude name in her ear. She was just the type of chaperone that Huy wanted.

They ate with the lamps trimmed low and the food served by one of the ancient slaves, and when they were finished Huy led Tanith up the outside staircase to the roof and they sat together below the parapet on reed mats and leather cushions. The night wind off the lake was cool and the stars very yellow and bright. Huy crouched over his lute, and strummed softly the rippling tune which he had trained Tanith’s unconscious mind to accept as the signal for hypnotic concentration. Before he had finished the last bars of the tune she was breathing slowly and evenly, her body still and her eyes dark green and unseeing.

While his fingers ran over the strings of the instrument, repeating the tune again and again, Huy began to speak. He kept his voice at a monotonous sing-song tone, speaking softly but insidiously and Tanith sat in the starlight and listened with an inner ear.

On the first day of the 106th Festival of the Fruitful Earth, Lannon Hycanus the forty-seventh Gry-Lion of Opet went in procession to the temple of Astarte to take the oracle.

He passed through the enclosure of the temple of Baal where the sacred towers pointed to the sun, guarded by the carved sunbird monoliths, and where the silent populace of the city waited, but when he reached the cleft in the red cliffs that guarded the entrance to the sacred grotto he unbuckled his sword and handed it to his little pygmy huntmaster, his shield and helmet he gave to his armour bearers, and bareheaded and unarmed he entered the opening in the cliff.

He passed through the paved tunnel and into the silent beauty of the grotto. The surrounds of the pool were paved with slabs of sandstone and the pool itself was edged with a rounded coping of the same material. Tiers of stone benches rose against the sheer walls of the grotto, and against the far wall the shrine of Astarte was built half into the living rock. Its portals were columned in the Hellenic style, and it contained the cells of the priestesses and the chamber of the oracle.

Beyond the stone throne, of the oracle was concealed the entrance to the city archives cut into the rock, and beyond that again, guarded by a massive stone door and the curse of the gods, was the treasury and the tomb of the kings.

Lannon paused beside the pool, and the priestesses came forward to meet him and escort him to the edge of the pool. Here they helped him to shed his armour and undergarments.

He stood tall and naked, golden-headed and beautifully formed, at the head of the steps leading down into the green water. His body was finely muscled as that of a trained athlete, although there was heavy bunched muscle in the shoulders and neck, the mark of the swordsman. His belly and flanks, however, were lean with the shape of muscle beneath the skin but lightly stated. A gilding of red-gold hair ran down from his navel across the flat stomach to explode in a sunny burst of curls in the angle of his legs. The legs were shapely, long and moulded, and balanced his regal bulk easily.

The High Priestess blessed him, and called down the goddess’s favour upon him. Then Lannon went down the steps and immersed himself in the sacred, life-giving water.

While two young novices dried his body and dressed the king in robes of fresh linen, Huy Ben-Amon sang the praise chant to the goddess and when it ended all eyes looked up to the opening in the roof of the cavern high above the green pool.

Lannon called out in a loud voice, ‘Astarte, mother of moon and earth, receive the messenger we send you - and hear our plea with favour.’

The throng about the pool lifted their hands high in the sign of the sun, and at the signal the body of the sacrifice plunged from the slab that jutted into the opening in the grotto roof. The wail of the doomed soul echoed briefly about the cavern, until he struck the water and was dragged down swiftly into the green depths by the weight of the chains he wore.

Lannon turned from the pool, and passed between the ranks of the priestesses into the entrance of the shrine. The audience chamber of the oracle was only a little larger than the living-room of a rich man’s house. The lamps burned with a steady light. The flames were tinted an unnatural greenish hue, and the incense of burning herbs was heavy and oppressive. There were draperies beyond the oracle’s throne hanging from roof to flagged floor.

The oracle sat upon the throne, a small figure completely swathed in white robes, the face hidden in the shadows of her hood.

Lannon halted in the centre of the chamber and before he spoke he admired for a moment the arrangements that put the interviewer at such a disadvantage. Barefoot, damp from the pool, stripped of weapons and finery, dressed in strange robes and forced to look up at the figure on the throne while he inhaled the subtly drugged air - he must be off balance. Lannon felt his anger stir, and his voice was harsh as he made the formal greeting and asked the first question.

Huy watched from his place of concealment behind the draperies. He revelled in the closeness of his friend’s physical presence, remembering his mannerisms and voice tones, watching the familiar and well-loved face, smiling at an expected change of expression, the quick smoulder of anger in the pale blue eyes, the quickening of interest at a warning, the glimmer of a smile as he recognized good advice.

Tanith spoke in the same sing-song cadence as Huy had used, picking the answers from the wide selection with which Huy had armed her.

When Lannon was finished and would have left the chamber, Tanith’s voice stopped him.

‘There is more.’

Lannon turned back with surprise, for he was not accustomed to unsolicited - and unpaid for - counsel from the oracle. But Tanith spoke, ‘The lion had a faithful jackal to warn him of the hunter’s approach, but drove the jackal away.

‘The sun had a bird to carry the sacrifices on high, but turned his countenance away from the bird.’

‘The hand had an axe to defend it, but cast the axe aside.’

‘Oh, proud lion! Oh, faithless sun! Oh, careless hand!’

Behind the drapery Huy held his breath. It had sounded very clever when he had composed it, but now spoken out in the bare stone chamber it shocked even him.

Lannon’s pale eyes seemed to glaze over as he puzzled the riddle, but it was not that subtle and as the import struck him his eyes cleared to the chill sparkle of sapphire and the blood engorged his face and neck.

‘Damn you, witch,’ he shouted. ‘Must I have it from you also? That cursed priest plagues me at every turn. I cannot walk the streets of my city but I hear the crowds sing his piddling songs. I cannot dine in my own banquet-room but my guests will repeat his empty mouthings. I cannot fight, nor drink a bowl of wine, nor toss a dice but his shadow stands at my shoulder.’ Lannon was panting with anger, as he stamped across the audience chamber and shook his fist in the oracle’s startled face. ‘My children even, he bewitches them also.’

Behind the drapes Huy felt his spirits soar on bright wings, this was not an enemy speaking.

‘He struts and lords it in the streets of my city, his name echoes through my kingdoms.’

Lannon’s anger was changing to righteous indignation.

‘They cheer him when he passes, I have heard it, and, by great Baal, they cheer him louder than they do their own king.’

Lannon swung away from the throne, unable to control his agitation. His eyes swept over the draperies and for an instant seemed to stare into Huy’s soul. Huy drew back with a quick intake of breath, but Lannon paced quickly about the chamber before approaching the oracle again.

‘He does all this, mark you, without my favour. He should be an outcast, a—’ He broke off and paced again, and his voice changed, the cutting edge of it dulled, and he said almost inaudibly, ‘How I miss that terrible little man.’

Huy doubted for a moment that the words had been spoken, but almost immediately Lannon’s voice rose in a bellow.

‘But he defied me. He took from me what was mine, and that I cannot overlook! ’

Lannon whirled and stormed from the shrine. His gentleman-at-arms and his huntmaster saw the expression on his face and they signalled the warnings ahead of the king’s furious progress back to the palace.

On the final day of the festival Lannon Hycanus prayed in the temple of great Baal, alone in the sacred grove among the towers and the sunbird monoliths. Then he emerged to receive the renewed pledges of loyalty from his subjects. Each of the nine noble families would be represented, as well as the order of priesthood, the guilds of craftsmen and the powerful trading syndicates of the kingdom. They would restate their oaths of allegiance to the throne, and present gifts to the Gry-Lion.

Huy Ben-Amon was absent from the ceremony. Bakmor made the oath for the priesthood and presented the gift. Lannon growled softly at the young warrior priest as he made obeisance before him.

‘Where is the Holy Father of Ben-Amon?’

‘My lord, I speak for him and all the priests of great Baal.’ Bakmor avoided the question as Huy had coached him, and Lannon could protest no further in the presence of his assembled nobles.

The ceremony ended the festival and Opet plunged into an orgy of food and wine and frolic and licence. While Lannon feasted with his nobles in the palace, the commoners thronged the narrow streets singing and dancing. The wine vendors passed freely amongst them, but during the daylight hours the restraint of custom and law checked the behaviour of the crowds. Darkness would bring on the lewd and wanton revels which characterized the festival. In the night the noble matrons and their pretty daughters would slip out, cloaked and hooded, into the streets to join the debauchery - or at the very least to watch it with shining eyes and breathless laughter. For a day and night the rules of society were suspended, and no husband nor wife could demand explanation or accounting from their spouses. It happened but once every five years, and when the festival ended there were wine-sore heads, pale faces and shaking hands, as well as smug and secret smiles.