The Sunbird

By the middle of the afternoon Lannon was drunk, expansively and happily drunk, as were most of his guests. The banquet-room of the palace was sweltering. The sun beat down fiercely upon the flat mud roof, while the body heat of 500 excited nobles, and the heat from the steaming dishes of rich food turned it into an oven.

The roar of voices drowned the valiant efforts of the musicians, and the artistry of the naked girl dancers was impaired by a barrage of ripe grapes aimed by a group of young and noble knights. Hits upon various parts of the girls’ anatomy scored for the marksmen in a contest upon which large ‘ amounts of gold were wagered.

Deep in wine and talk, Lannon was not aware of the change in the feast until almost complete silence had descended upon the hall. He looked up, frowning quickly, and saw that the musicians’ hands had frozen upon their instruments, the dancers stood paralysed, and the guests gawked.

Lannon’s frown deepened to a scowl as he saw Huy Ben-Amon approaching him down the hall. Huy was dressed in a blue tunic with a border of woven gold wire. He wore a gold belt, and a jewelled dagger. His hair and beard were carefully oiled and curled, and golden earrings dangled to his shoulders.

His expression was solemn as he knelt quickly before Lannon, and his voice rang golden and sweet to every corner of the hall.

‘My king, I come to renew my allegiance to you. Let all men know that I honour you above all things, and my loyalty is unto death and beyond.’

Lannon was caught off balance, as Huy had intended. His brain was fuddled with surprise and wine. He fumbled for words, but before he found them, Huy had risen swiftly.

‘As a mark of my faith, I offer a gift.’ He signalled with one hand behind his back, and all heads in the hall swung to the main doors.

The towering figure of Timon stalked into the hall, passed down its length and stopped beside Huy. He stared into Lannon’s face with those ferocious smoky eyes.

Huy whispered, ‘Down!’ And nudged the giant slave, and slowly Timon lowered himself to one knee and bowed his head.

‘But he belongs to the gods,’ Lannon challenged harshly. ‘You declared him god-marked, priest.’

And Huy gathered his resolve, steeling himself to tell the lie, to commit this sacrilege. Despite the fact that he had already explained it to the gods and to Timon, he was uneasy. It was necessary to regain the king’s favour, Huy had explained, there was but one way of doing so. Lannon was bound by his pride. He could not move to break the deadlock. Huy must make the offer. He asked great Baal for permission to deny the bird-footed marking of the slave. He asked aloud, while pacing the roof of his house in the noon day. A distant muttering of summer thunder had been all the answer Huy needed. The gods had answered, but Huy felt nervous, the answer had been in a very minor key, and not without ambiguity. It was also very difficult for Huy to admit that he was wrong - it jarred the very foundations of his soul.

‘My lord,’ said Huy, ‘I was mistaken. The gods have shown me that the markings are not sacred.’

Lannon stared at Huy. He shook his head slightly, as though he doubted the evidence of his own ears.

‘You mean - you give him to me without reservation? I can have him dispatched immediately, if I wish to?’ He leaned forward staring at Huy, ‘Do you give him to me without conditions?’

‘I have declared my love for the king,’ said Huy, and with his foot he nudged Timon.

In a great rumbling bass, Timon spoke his lines in near perfect Punic. ‘I come to you as a living proof of that love.’

Lannon rocked back on his cushions. He thought about it, and the scowl reappeared, as he saw it.

‘You seek to chain me! There are still conditions - only better concealed,’ he growled.

‘Nay, my lord. Not chains, but the silken threads of friendship,’ Huy told him softly. They held each other’s eyes, Lannon beginning to flush with anger. Huy steady and calm.

Then suddenly Huy’s face cracked, and the dark eyes sparkled. The ringlets on his cheeks began to dance with suppressed laughter. Lannon opened his mouth to bellow at him, to reject the gift and the offer of friendship. Instead, laughter rattled up his throat and burst from his open lips. He laughed, until the tears poured down his cheeks and between gusts of laughter he moaned with the pain of his aching belly muscles.

‘Fly for me, bird of the sun,’ he sobbed, and Huy flopped down beside him on the cushions and shook and quivered with laughter.

‘Roar for me. Lion of Opet,’ he cried and a slave girl filled a wine bowl and brought it to him. Huy quaffed half of it, then passed the bowl to Lannon. He drained it. A little wine ran from the comers of his mouth into his golden beard. He smashed the bowl on the stone floor, then clasped Huy about the shoulders.

‘We have wasted much time, my Sunbird. Let us make up for it. What shall we do first?’

‘Drink,’ said Huy,

‘Ah!’ cried Lannon. ‘And then what?’

‘Hunt’, suggested Huy, choosing those activities dearest to the king.

‘Hunt!’ Lannon echoed. ‘Send for my huntmasters - we march tomorrow to hunt the elephant!’

‘Astarte, mother of earth, your beauty is multiplied until it floods my soul,’ muttered Huy, swaying gracefully, as he looked up at the night sky. He reeled backwards, but fell against a wall. It steadied him, and he went on studying the astronomical phenomena in the heavens. Four silver moons hung above the night-revelling city. Huy closed one eye, and three of the moons vanished - he opened it and they reappeared.

‘Astarte, guide your servant’s footsteps,’ Huy entreated, pushed himself away from the wall and went on down the narrow lane towards the harbour. He stumbled over a body lying in the shadows, and stooped unsteadily to check for signs of life.

The body snored and grunted as he rolled it onto its back, and a warm fruity gust of winey breath came up to Huy. It reminded him of the recumbent figures he had left strewn about the banquet hall at the palace. Lannon chief among them, smiling as he slept.

‘Tonight you are in good company, citizen of Opet,’ Huy chuckled, and went tottering onwards down the lane. In an angle of the wall a dark shape moved. Huy peered at it curiously, saw one body, two heads, heard broken gusty breathing, soft incoherent cries. The movements were small, but unmistakable. Huy smiled, tripped and nearly fell. He saw a startled girl’s face turn towards him from the gloom. ‘Let all things be fruitful,’ he told her solemnly and went on, and as he went another figure slipped silently from the dark lane and followed Huy. The figure was cloaked and hooded in rough woven brown cloth, and its movements were stealthy and deliberate

The quayside of the harbour was crowded with revellers, and there were bonfires burning here. The reflections of the flames smeared ruddy and bright upon the still black waters of the lake. Around them, arms linked in a circle, danced the crowds. Some of the women were past all restraint, stripped naked to the waist, spilled wine snaking down their white bodies like blood.

Huy stopped to watch them a while, and the following figure hung back, mingling with the throng of merrymakers.

When Huy started forward, the cloaked figure hurried forward also. The lane that led up to Huy’s house was in deep darkness, but a lamp burned dimly in a niche above the gate, left there to welcome the master home.

As Huy groped his way towards the light, the following figure closed with him silently and swiftly. The blundering sounds of his own progress blanketed the rustle of cloth and the light footfalls behind him.

Huy reached the gate, and he stood in the dim lamplight. His dagger was under his cloak, and his sword hand reached out for the latch of the gate. In that instant while he was unready and off balance, the dark figure flew at him from out of the darkness. A hand closed on his wrist, and he was thrown back against the wall beside the gate. Wine had slowed his reflexes, he twisted bis face upwards in surprise and alarm. He saw the dark figure, with its face hidden in the recesses of the hood, come at him - and before he could shout soft lips were pressed against his, and a little muffled chuckle broke through these lips into his startled mouth - and he felt warm breasts and thighs moving against him.

The shock of it paralysed Huy. For long seconds he stood utterly still while lips and cunning hands teased and goaded him. Then with a hoarse cry he reached for the taut warm woman shape, and immediately it was gone, slipping away beyond his reach.

He lunged for it wildly, his hands groping air, and the shape danced away, swirled through the gateway into Huy’s house and slammed the gate closed.

Cursing desperately, Huy struggled with the gate, wrenched it open at last and ran into the entrance court.

There was a flash of dark movement across the court, disappearing into the house, and Huy raced after it, tripped over a cushion and fell full length, knocked over a stool on which a house slave had left an amphora and wine bowl. They shattered loudly, splashing wine across the mud floor. A mocking whisper of laughter, from the dim recesses of the house, sent Huy scrambling to his feet and charging onwards. He saw the cloaked figure silhouetted against the lamplit doorway of his sleeping quarters.

‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘Who are you?’ And his house slaves roused by the uproar came running, still halt asleep, panicky and hastily armed.

‘Be gone!’ Huy shouted at them furiously. ‘All of you - the first one I catch out of his room before morning, I will have flogged.’ And they retreated to their quarters, not seriously alarmed by the threat. Huy maintained his dignity until the last of them had disappeared, then he turned and charged towards the doorway of his sleeping quarters.

There was a night lamp burning here also, on a low stool beside his bed. The wick was trimmed low, a soft orange puddle of light which left the farthest reaches of the room in darkness. Beside the lamp stood the cloaked woman. She stood motionless and the face within the hood was completely hidden although Huy thought he caught the sheen of reflected light off watching eyes.

The force of Huy’s charge carried him half across the room, but in the wrong direction. He swung towards her, and at that moment she stooped and snuffed the lamp flame. The room was plunged into darkness, and Huy’s charge ended against the wall. He gathered himself quickly, he was sobering fast now, and he crouched beside the wall listening.

He heard the rustle of cloth, and he pounced. His fingers closed on a hem of the cloak. There was a muted shriek of surprise, and the fold of material was plucked from his fingers. He swore bitterly, and with arms widespread groped like a blind man about the room.

He sensed movements near him, the lightest breathing, the softest stirring in the darkness. He reached out quickly, and his fingers brushed against smooth skin. He recognized the shape of a nude back, and the plump warm bulge of a buttock. A soft chuckle and it was gone again. Huy froze with his heart hammering at his ribs, and his physical arousal making him momentarily dizzy.

Whoever she was, she had discarded the cloak. He was alone with a woman who was elusive as a darting lake pike, and as naked as a newborn babe. Like a stalking leopard he went alter her, stripping his own tunic and breech clout as he went, dropping them carelessly on the floor, until, except for the gold rings in his ears, he was as bare as his own passion.

She was panicky in the darkness now, unable to control the gasps and nervous giggles. And Huy hunted her by ear, closing in on her, driving her into the corner beside the bed.

She nearly escaped again, ducking under his searching hands but one of his long arms whipped around her waist and he lifted her easily. She squealed now, kicking like a captive animal, her fists beating against his face and chest.

He carried her to the thick pile of furs that made up his bed.

Huy woke with a sense of peace, a feeling of deep happiness.

His body seemed softened and enervated, but his mind was clear and sharply focused. The soft pinks of dawn suffused his chamber and the cry of the winging lake birds carried clearly to him.

He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at the girl who slept beside him in the storm-tossed bed. She had cast aside her covering in the warm spring night. Her hair was moist at the temples, and a fine sheen of moisture shone on her softly pouting upper lip. Her eyes were closed, and she slept so lightly that her breathing barely stirred the mass of soft dark hair which lay upon her cheeks.

One arm was thrown over her head, pulling the surprisingly large breasts out of shape. Her breasts were big and full and round for the long slim length of her body, and the tips were still flushed dark red from the loving of the night. Her skin was smooth and pale creamy olive, with violent puffs of black silky hair in her armpits and at the base of her belly.

Huy saw all of this in his first startled glance, before his eyes fastened on her calm and sleeping face.

Incredulously Huy stared at her, all sound locked away in his throat. He felt horror, and awe, and superstitious terror.

The girl opened her eyes, and saw him and smiled.

‘Baal’s blessings on you, Holy Father,’ she said softly,

‘Tanith!’ gasped Huy.

‘Yes, my lord.’ She was still smiling.

‘This is sacrilege, Huy whispered. ’This is an offence against the goddess.‘

‘To deny my love for you would have been an offence against all nature.’ Tanith sat up on the bed, and kissed him without remorse, without the least sign of guilt.

‘Love?’ Huy asked, his misgivings temporarily forgotten.

‘Yes, my lord,’ Tanith nodded, and kissed him again.

‘But—’ Huy stuttered, and his cheeks turned bright as bush fires. ‘You cannot - how can you love me?’

‘How can I not, my lord?’

‘But my body - my back.’

‘Your back I love because it is part of you, part of your goodness and kindness and wisdom.’

He stared at her for many seconds, then clumsily he took her in his arms and buried his face in the fragrant dark cloud of her hair.

‘Oh, Tanith,’ he whispered. ‘What are we going to do?’

Huy stood on the hilltop in the dawn and waited for his god. Below him the camp stirred. The cooking fires paled in the growing light of day. Small sounds carried up to him, the sounds of 6,000 men preparing for the hunt. The 6,000 warriors of Huy’s legion, and the king’s train, and the slaves and the women and the elephants and the baggage train. Small wonder that the camp filled the entire valley on both sides of the small river that flowed down the escarpment of the hills. Thirty miles away to the north lay the sluggish green ribbon of the great river, sweltering in its hot and inhospitable valley. One of Lannon’s legions was camped there already, and for days now they had been harassing the elephant herds that were feeding along the river. They had attacked them with archers, and javelin-throwers and war elephants.

Under this harassment the herds would leave the valley, taking to their ancient roads out over the escarpment. Lannon was encamped now astride these well-blazed trails, and scouts from the valley had reported the previous evening that the herds were already on the move. They were massing and moving in towards the escarpment wall, and in the next few days they would come pouring up out of the valley in long majestic files, as the old bulls led them to sanctuary from the persistent hunters who plagued them.

Huy Ben-Amon pondered this as he stood in the dawn. He wore light hunting armour and running sandals, and he leaned comfortably on the shaft of the vulture axe. The splendid blade was covered with a soft leather sheath to protect the finely honed edge and the delicate engravings. It seemed to Huy that the gods had so arranged circumstances as to provide him with this opportunity.

For two weeks, ever since that last night of the Festival of the Fruitful Earth, Huy had spent most of his waking moments pondering his dilemma. He had spent hours poring over the sacred books, examining the roles of priest and priestess, their duties and relationship to the gods, and to each other. He thought that from all this research he had built up a case for his behaviour. He could not bring himself to call it sacrilege. He had come now to plead his case, and to receive judgement.

The sun shot its first golden lance against the crest of the hill, and Huy sang the praise chant with all the beauty at his command. Then he made his plea. It was complicated dialectic, based on the concept of earthly representation, and amounting to a line of reasoning which supposed that what was good behaviour between Baal and his mate Astarte would be equally justifiable between their earthly representatives -although, of course, not between a priestess and any other person than the High Priest of Baal. Huy glossed over the more evidently weak spots in his case.

He ended, ‘It may be, however, great Baal and heavenly Astarte, that I am mistaken in my reasoning. It may well be that I have sinned. If this is the case then I deserve your full wrath and, despite my life of service and faithful duty, I deserve the most dire punishment! ’

Huy paused tor effect. ‘I go now to hunt the elephant. I swear on my life that wherever the chase is hottest, there I shall be. Wherever the danger is deadliest, there I shall be.

‘It I have sinned - then let the tusked beasts strike me down. If I have not sinned then let me live and return to the bosom of your priestess. If you grant me life and love - I swear my duty and service will last to the end of my days, and no man nor woman will ever know of the dispensation you have granted me.’ He was quiet a while longer then he spoke again, ‘You who have loved, take pity on one who loves also.’

Huy came down the hill well satisfied with his bargain. He would give the gods full measure. He would not hang back in distaste from the slaughter today, the gods would have every opportunity to demonstrate their outrage. In any event, Huy was well aware that only death could keep him out of Tanith’s arms. The taste of that fruit had been too sweet for him ever to deny it.

‘Huy,’ Lannon shouted as Huy entered the camp. ‘Where have you been?’ He was armed and striding impatiently back and forth outside his tent. He came towards Huy quickly. ‘The day wastes away,’ he cried. ‘Already from the hills our lookouts have seen the approach of the herds.’

The war elephants were ready, drivers sitting on their necks and the tall castles on their backs. Lannon’s hunting party was assembled about the tent. Among them Huy noticed some of the king’s most renowned huntmasters: Mursil, with his purple boozy face, the lean and saturnine Zadal, Huya the celebrated bowman, and the diminutive yellow Xhai whose fame as a tracker had grown apace in the last few years. Beyond them amongst the horde of body slaves towered the colossal black bulk of Timon. Huy smiled at him, and then he hurried beside Lannon to the elephant lines.

Lannon told him, ‘You will ride with me, Sunbird.’ And Huy replied, ‘I am honoured, my lord.

Mursil handed Huy one of the elephant bows. Few men could draw these massive weapons. Carved from solid baulks of wild ebony, they were as thick at the centre as a man’s wrist and strung with twisted strands of lion gut. It required immense strength in the arms and chest to draw one of the five-foot arrows that were armed with a heavy steel head and flighted with wild duck feathers. However, once drawn to the limit and loosed, they could fly 100 paces and bury the arrow up to its feathers in the living flesh of an elephant. They could reach the mighty heart in its castle of ribs, they could cut deep into the massive pink lungs, or loosed with skill they could cut through the ear-hole in the great bony skull and find the brain.

‘I know you prefer the bow to the spear, Holy Father,’ Mursil murmured respectfully. ‘As for me, my old arm can no longer draw.’

‘Thank you, huntmaster.’

‘The quivers are full. I have tested and selected each of the arrows,’ Mursil assured him, and Huy followed Lannon to where his war elephant knelt. It was a rangy old cow, more steady than the bull in the heat of battle, more reliable and even-tempered than the bull in the hunt.

Huy followed Lannon up into the castle. There was room for three men in the wooden box. The arrow quivers were fitted to the outside, but with the arrow-heads standing up ready to the hand. The javelins were racked on the front of the castle and Lannon selected one and tested it thoughtfully.

‘A nice balance,’ he judged it, and then looked down to where his huntmasters waited anxiously, each of them eager for the honour of riding with the Gry-Lion. Lannon glanced over them, but his eye stopped on Xhai. He nodded, and with pathetic gratitude the pygmy scrambled up the elephant’s side.

With a heavy lurch that threw Huy against the edge of the castle, the elephant came up on its feet. They looked down from the majestic height of nearly eighteen feet, and the driver goaded the old cow into a stately swaying walk. They took the trail down towards the escarpment of the valley.

‘I have selected a good place for it,’ Lannon told Huy. ‘Where the steep path comes out suddenly into a small flat bowl. We will wait for them there.’

Huy looked back and saw the other war elephants following them. Twenty of them in single file, ears flapping, trunks swinging they trundled sedately along. The huntsmen in the castles were checking and testing their weapons, and chattering excitedly.

‘For what do we hunt, my lord?’ Huy asked. ‘Calves or ivory?’

‘Calves first. The elephant trainers have asked for two dozen youngsters between five and ten years old. We will capture those this morning, for it will be the breeding herds that come up out of the valley first. Then later we will hunt for ivory. The scouts report many fine bulls scattered along the great river.’

The saucer which Lannon had selected was hemmed in with steep broken ground. It was circular in shape, perhaps 500 paces across. The elephant road came into it through a narrow rocky pass, crossed the saucer and climbed out of it up a steep pitch to the high ground above. The saucer was thickly wooded, and Lannon placed his war elephants in ambush, concealing them about the perimeter of the bowl in the good cover. The war elephants were forced to kneel for better concealment, and while they waited Huy and Lannon breakfasted on cold corn cakes, cheese and roast salt beef washed down with red wine. It was a hunter’s meal, taken in cover with the mounting excitement of the chase sharpening their appetites, and as they ate they kept glancing up at the lookouts on the high ground above the saucer whose task it was to watch for and to signal the approach of the herds.

The dew was still on the grass when a figure waved frantically from the skyline above them, and Lannon grunted with satisfaction and wiped the grease from his fingers and lips.

‘Come, my Sunbird,’ he said, and they mounted the kneeling elephant once more.

It was a long wait that stretched and tightened their nerves, then suddenly little Xhai stirred expectantly beside Huy and bis dark amber eyes snapped.

‘They are here,’ he whispered, and almost immediately a single wild elephant came out through the rocky portals of the pass and paused on the lip of the saucer. It was an old cow, grey and lean and tuskless. Suspiciously she looked about the saucer, lifting her trunk to sample the air and then blowing the sample into her mouth against the olfactory glands in her upper lip. The breeze was behind her, a soft dry movement of air that carried the smell of waiting men away from her, and she lowered her trunk and moved forward.

From the pass behind her poured an avalanche of great grey bodies.

‘Breeding herd,’ murmured Lannon, and Huy saw the calves at heel. They ranged in size from almost full grown to not much bigger than a large pig. The smaller they were the more noisy and mischievous, squealing and frolicking and chasing between the legs of their mothers. Huy smiled at the attempts of one to suckle from his moving mother, groping for the teats between her front legs with his miniature trunk until in exasperation the mother picked up a fallen branch and swatted him mercilessly across the rump. The calf squealed and fell in at her heels again, demure and chastened.

The saucer was full of wild elephants now, their grey humped backs showing above the thick bush as they streamed along the ancient road to safety.

Lannon leaned forward and touched the driver on the shoulder, and the war elephant rose beneath them lifting them high so that they could look down from their castle upon the quarry. All around the saucer, the war elephants rose from cover with the armed men upon their backs. They closed in on the herd quietly, the squealing and uproar from the calves blanketing their approach until they were right in amongst the herd.

Lannon selected a young cow with a half-grown calf and leaning out from the castle he hurled his javelin into her neck, aiming for the great arteries there. The cow squealed in pain and alarm, and bright red arterial blood blew in a cloud from the tip of her trunk. She reeled backwards, mortally wounded, and from the other castles a torrent of missiles flew into the herd. Hundreds of huge bodies burst into flight and the forest shook and rang with their trumpeting and their frantic efforts at escape.

Despite his promise to the gods, Huy did not raise his bow, but watched in awful fascination the slaughter of the terrified beasts. He saw an old cow, bristling with arrows and javelins charge one of the war elephants and knock it down on its knees; the men were hurled from the castle to fall beneath stampeding hooves, and the old cow tottered away to fall and die, still in her battle rage. He saw a calf, hit in error, trying to tear the arrow from its own flank and squealing pitifully as the barbs clung stubbornly in the flesh. He saw another calf attempting vainly to rouse its dead mother, tugging at her with its little trunk.

Lannon was shouting with excitement, hurling his javelins into the neck and spine with that deadly accuracy that dropped the great grey bodies in profusion about them.

One of the herd mothers charged them from the side; a bad-tempered old queen as big and as strong as their mount, she bore down on them. Lannon swung to face her, braced himself and threw, but the old queen lifted her trunk and the javelin struck it squarely, biting deep into that pulpy sensitive member just below the level of her eyes. She squealed in agony but never faltered in her run, and regretfully Huy lifted his bow. He knew she would charge home, and that only death would stop her.

The old queen lifted her head and trunk high, bracing herself for the impact of her charge. Her mouth was wide open, with the pointed lower lip dangling, and Huy drew and loosed his shaft into the back of her throat. All five feet of the arrow disappeared into her gaping mouth, and he knew the point had found the brain for she reeled back onto her haunches, shuddering and quivering, a strangled gurgling cry bubbling from her throat. The lids of her eyes twitched violently and she fell forward and was still.

They killed forty-one cows, thirty of them with calf. However, nine of the calves were adjudged by the trainers too young for survival as orphans and they were put down with a single merciful arrow. The others were cut out and rounded up by specially trained nursing cows and led away from the mountainous bleeding carcasses of their mothers. By noon the work was done, and the slaves could busy themselves in butchering the carcasses and carrying the meat away to the smoking racks. The saucer was a reeking charnel-house, and the vultures turned overhead in a dark cloud that almost obscured the sun.

Lannon ate the midday meal with his nobles and hunt-masters. Fresh grilled elephant tripe seasoned with hot pepper sauce, broiled elephant heart stuffed with wild rice and olives, platters of golden corn cakes and the inevitable earthen amphorae of Zeng wine made it a meal fit for a hunter’s appetite.

Lannon was in a high good humour, striding amongst his men, laughing and jesting with them, picking out one or another for a special commendation. He was still wrought up by the excitement of the chase, and when he paused beside Huy he meant to chaff him when he said:

‘My poor Sunbird, you loosed but one arrow during the whole hunt.’ And Huy was about to answer lightly that one arrow for one elephant was as good a score as any, when suddenly Zadal the huntmaster from the middle kingdom laughed.

‘Was the bow too strong for you, Holiness, or the game too fierce?’

There was sudden and deathly silence on the entire group, and all their faces turned towards the lean dark man with the thin sneering mouth and bright acquisitive eyes.

It took a few seconds of the silence for Zadal to realize what he had said, then he glanced quickly about the circle of watching faces. With a small chill he saw they were looking at him with that same detached curious expression that men looked upon those doomed to sacrifice. Beside him a noble said softly but matter of factly, ‘You are a dead man.’

Swiftly, with real alarm, Zadal looked back at Huy Ben-Amon. Too late he recalled the reputation of this priest. It was said that no man still lived who had sneered at his back or his height or his courage. With relief he saw that the priest was smiling slightly, and delicately wiping his fingers on the hem of his tunic.

‘Thank you, great Baal’, Huy prayed silently, smiling a little. ‘It was right that you remind me of my promise. I held back from the hunt. Forgive me, great Baal. I will give you your chance now.’

Zadal’s relief was shortlived for when Huy looked directly at him he saw the smile was on the priest’s lips only. His eyes were bright and black and cold.

‘Zadal,’ Huy said softly, and the crowd pressed closer to hear his words. ‘Will you fly with me on the wings of the storm?’

They stirred at the challenge, a quick buzz of comment and they watched Zadal’s face. It had paled to a dirty yellow, and his lips compressed into a thin white line.

‘I forbid it,’ said Lannon loudly. ‘I will not let you do this, Huy. You are too valuable to me to waste your life in—’

Huy interrupted him quietly, ‘Majesty, it is a matter of honour. This one called me coward.’

‘But no man has hunted in that manner for fifty years,’ Lannon protested.

‘Fifty years is too long,’ Huy smiled, ‘is it not, Zadal? You and I will revive the custom.’

Zadal stared at him, hating his own unruly tongue.

Huy still smiled at him. ‘Or is it that the game is too fierce for you?’ he asked softly. For long moments it seemed that Zadal might refuse, then he nodded curtly, his lips still white.

‘As you wish, Holiness.’ And he knew they were right, he was a dead man.

In two large baskets, slaves had collected from one of the elephant carcasses the contents of the lower intestines. As Huy and Zadal, stripped naked, smeared their bodies with the yellow dung he overheard young Bakmor discussing the hunt with Mursil.

‘I do not believe it is possible to kill a full-grown bull elephant with a battle-axe. It sounds to me like an unpleasant form of suicide.’

‘That’s why they call it flying on the wings of the storm.’

The elephant dung had a rank odour, strong enough to mask the man smell. It was the one protection the hunters would have. Their one chance of getting into close contact with the great beasts without being discovered. The sharp sense of smell of the elephant is its main defence, for its vision is weak and near sighted.

Timon came over from the king’s entourage and assisted Huy, spreading the dung across his back. Quickly Timon had understood the method that they would use.

‘High-born, I fear for you,’ he said softly.

I fear for myself,‘ Huy admitted. ’Spread the dung thickly, Timon. I would prefer to stink, rather than die.‘

Huy looked down the steep slope which stretched down into the valley from the saucer. The elephant road zig-zagged up through the sparse forest. They would intercept the next herd here, before it was alarmed by the smell of blood in the saucer.

Huy glanced around him and saw that the huntsmen had spread out along the ridge, selecting vantage points from which to view the sport. His eyes met those of Zadal. The huntmaster was daubed with the yellow filth from his head to his feet, and he gripped the handle of his axe too hard. There was fear in those dark eyes, and tear in the taut manner in which he held himself. Huy smiled at him, enjoying his discomfort, and Zadal looked away. His lips quivered.

‘Are you ready, huntmaster?’ Huy asked, and Zadal nodded. He could not trust his voice.

‘Come,’ said Huy, and started down the slope, but Lannon stepped into his path. There was a foreboding in his eyes, and his smile was unconvincing.

‘That fool Zadal spoke in haste and without meaning it. No man here doubts your courage, Huy, except you yourself. Do not seek to prove it too convincingly. Life will hold little for me without my Sunbird.’

‘My lord,’ Huy’s voice was hoarse. He was touched to the heart by Lannon’s concern.

‘The first cut is the dangerous one, Huy. Be careful that when he drops, he does not fall upon you’

‘I will remember.’

‘Remember also to bathe before you dine with me this evening.’ Lannon smiled and stepped aside.

Twice during the afternoon small herds of elephant passed them, moving swiftly up the slope amongst the trees. Each time Huy shook his head at Zadal and let them pass for they were cows and calves and immature bulls.

The day drew towards its close, and Huy felt an uneasy sense of relief. Perhaps the gods had decided in his favour and would not seek to put him to the test.

There was an hour of light left now. Huy and Zadal sat quietly beside the path, hidden by a screen of monkey apple vines that hung from one of the trees.

The dung had dried upon their bodies, making Huy’s skin feel stiff and uncomfortable. He sat with the vulture axe across his lap and watched the path, hoping that nothing would come up it before darkness and he could abandon this mad adventure to which he was committed by honour and hasty choice. It was strange how inactivity dulled even the brightest passion, Huy thought, and grinned wryly as he fondled the handle of the axe.

He saw movement far down the slope, a grey drifting movement like smoke amongst the trees and he felt his skin prickle. Zadal had seen it also, he stopped his restless fidgeting and sat woodenly beside Huy.

They waited, and suddenly two elephants came out of the trees. Two big old bulls, with heavy ivory, stepping lightly up the slope. They were a hundred paces apart, spaced out on the path and there was an alertness and a sense of purpose in their tread that warned Huy they had been freshly disturbed, possibly wounded, by the huntsmen down in the valley.

‘We will take these two,’ Huy whispered. ‘Choose one.’

Zadal was silent a moment, watching the two bulls with an experienced eye. The leading bull was older, and his one tusk was broken off at the lip. He was leaner and rangier-looking than his companion, and his leading position showed he was the more experienced, the more alert, and the broken tusk would make him meaner and his temper more uncertain.

‘The second one,’ Zadal whispered, and Huy nodded. He had expected it.

‘I will move back now. We must try to attack at the same moment.’ He left the cover of the hanging vines, and slipped back along the path opening a gap between him and Zadal approximately equal to that between the bulls.

Huy dropped into a patch of coarse grass beside the trail, and looked back. The elephants were striding steadily up towards them. The leading bull passed Zadal’s hiding place, and came on. Huy saw that the gap between the two bulls had closed. Zadal’s elephant would reach him before Huy’s came level with the clump of grass where he lay.

If one of the hunters launched his attack prematurely the other bull would be alerted, and the danger multiplied many times. Huy knew he could not rely on consideration from Zadal. The man would think only of his own best interests.

As the thought came to him he saw Zadal leave the shelter of the vines, and run silently out into the path behind the second bull. Huy’s elephant was still fifty paces from where he lay, and it was facing him.

Zadal was following his elephant, running close upon its heels. Huy felt a moment’s admiration for him. Perhaps he had misjudged him. Perhaps Zadal would follow the second bull and wait for Huy to get into position.

Then Huy saw the huntmaster’s axe go up and glint at the top of its swing; as it flashed down, Huy transferred all his attention to the leading bull.

There was a squeal of pain and alarm as Zadal’s axe struck, and Huy’s bull burst into a full run. Sweeping down on him until it seemed to fill the whole field of Huy’s vision, an animal as large as the very path it sprang from.

As Huy rose from his hide he knew he had a few fleeting seconds in which to strike. The the bull would be gone.

He went bounding along beside the bull, keeping uphill of him for when he fell he would roll down the slope. The pace stretched Huy’s long legs to the full, and he was losing ground swiftly, falling back to the bull’s hindquarters.

With every pace, as the huge weight of the grey body fell on the hind legs, so the hamstring tendons running down the back of the leg from knee to heel tightened under the coarse eroded skin. The tendon was a thick cord, that flexed and bulged, thick as a girl’s wrist; it carried the whole weight of the bull at each stride.

Huy swerved in his ran, crossing behind the bull and as the tendon in the nearest leg tightened he slashed the blade of the vulture axe across it, severing it cleanly so that the sound of it was a sharp snapping, like the sheet of a sail parting in a gale.

The bull lunged off balance as the leg collapsed under him, he teetered wildly on the edge of the path, his weight held only on the good leg.

‘For Baal!’ Huy shouted with excitement and the axe went high as he swung. The second tendon parted as sharply, and the huge grey beast dropped heavily. The sound of its fall carried clearly to the watchers on the ridge, and a cloud of dust boiled up from the dry earth. Huy had danced back from under the rolling body and that terrible flailing trunk.

He steeled himself for the final act. as he danced about the rearing floundering animal, knowing he had only seconds to exploit his surprise, seconds before the maimed animal braced itself and saw him, and he searched for his opening desperately.

The bull reared up on its front legs, dragging its crippled hind legs behind it. In its unreasoning rage it was tearing at the trees, and slashing its terrible trunk in wild circles, gouging the earth with its single tusk.

But its back was turned to Huy, it had not recognized its attacker yet. Lightly Huy ran in, ducking under the flailing trunk. He vaulted up on the bull’s wide back, landing on his knees with the axe high above his head.

The knotted spine stood out clearly through the wrinkled dry skin, great knuckles of bone braced for the blade. Huy struck, the killing stroke that crashed through the bone, and severed the soft yellow core of the spinal tissue. The bull shrieked, and collapsed, kicking and shaking spasmodically in its death throes,

Huy jumped down from its pulsating body and danced back out of danger from the legs and trunk of the dying beast. He felt a soaring sense of triumph and relief. It was done, he had flown upon the wings of the storm - and lived through it.

He heard the wild shrill trumpeting of the other bull, and he spun around. One glance showed him that the task was not yet completed, the gods were not finished with him.

Zadal had blundered. His second cut had missed the tendon and the bull was on three legs, but moving with agility and speed as it hunted the man. Zadal had thrown his axe aside, and was running, dodging up the slope with the bull close upon him. The bull was shrieking with rage, its trunk outstretched, gaining swiftly on the fleeing man.

As Huy started forward it caught him. It wrapped its trunk around Zadal’s body and flung him high in the air, above the tops of the tallest trees and his body spun loosely in the air. He fell face down on the rocky earth, and the bull placed one foot in the small of his back while with its trunk it plucked his head from his body, the way a farmer kills a chicken, and it tossed the head aside. It bounced and rolled down the slope like a child’s ball.

Huy ran towards the bull, scrambling up the slope. The bull knelt on the mangled corpse and drove one tusk through Zadal’s chest. It was so preoccupied with the mutilation of Zadal’s body that Huy came up easily behind it.

He saw the deep gash in the back of the bull’s knee where Zadal’s stroke had failed to find the tendon, and the vulture axe moaned softly in flight. This time there was no mistake.

‘I give you a new title.’ Lannon lifted his wine bowl, and silence fell expectantly on the nobles and knights who sat about his board. I give a battle honour for the man who has flown on the wings of the storm.‘

Huy dropped his eyes modestly, blushing a little in the torch light under the leather awning of Lannon’s campaign tent.

‘Huy Ben-Amon - Axeman of the Gods!’ Lannon shouted the title, and the nobles echoed it, saluting Huy with clenched fists.

‘Drink. Huy! Drink, my Sunbird!’ Lannon offered Huy his own wine bowl. Huy sipped the wine, smiling around at the company. Tonight he would not look too deeply into the wine bowl. He did not want to cloud or befuddle this sense of joy. The gods had answered him. and he sat quietly smiling in the midst of noisy revelry, hardly hearing the laughter and the banter, listening instead to the voice deep inside him which sang, Tanith! Tanith!‘

When he rose to leave, Lannon was outraged, dragging him down into his seat by the hem of his tunic.

‘You’ll not leave here on your feet, Axeman. You deserve to be carried to your couch this night! Come, I challenge you to a bout with the wine cups.’

Huy shrugged aside the challenge, laughing and shaking his head.

‘One challenge a day, my lord, I beg of you.’

Outside the night was still, and the sky was brilliant with the stars. The heat of the day was cooling, and the feel of the night wind in his face was like the caress of Tanith’s silky tresses against his cheek.

‘Astarte!’ The goddess rose out of the valley, the golden disc of her countenance lighting the land with a soft radiance. ‘Mother of earth, I thank you,’ Huy whispered, and felt the tears of happiness flood his eyes.

He moved on through the camp towards his own tent, hugging the warmth of his love secretly to him.

Tanith,‘ he whispered, ’Tanith.‘

He moved on through the shadows until movement caught his attention, and he stopped. Beside one of the cooking fires crouched a figure, a slave woman working on the grinding stone, crushing corn for cakes.

The firelight caught her handsome features, and shone on the dark skin of her strong arms. It was the nurse Sellene.

Huy was about to move on, when the slave girl looked up expectantly. A man came towards her out of the darkness, and the girl’s face lit with such a look of adoration, such unashamed love, that Huy felt his heart go out to her

The man stepped into the firelight, and it needed only one glance at the powerful body and rounded bald head for Huy to recognize Timon.

Sellene stood up and went quickly to meet Timon, and they embraced. Then sniffed at each other’s face in the strange love greeting of the pagans, holding each other closely. Huy smiled tenderly, feeling the warm sympathy of the lover for all other lovers Timon drew back from the girl, holding her at arm’s length and he spoke softly. Huy could not catch the words. He heard only the sort rumble of Timon’s voice, and the girl nodded quickly.

Timon left her and disappeared amongst the tents. Sellene went to the grinding stone and filled a leather bag with ground corn, then she glanced about furtively and followed Timon into the darkness. Huy watched her go, and smiled.

‘I must talk to Lannon,’ he thought. ‘I could arrange a pairing between those two.’

In his own tent Huy took the golden scroll and spread it upon his writing pallet. He adjusted the lamp wicks, picked up his engraving tool, and began to write the poem to Tanith.

‘Her hair is dark and soft as the smoke from the papyrus fires upon the great lake,’ he wrote, and the incident between Timon and Sellene was forgotten.

Exhaustion overcame him a little after midnight, and he fell forward across his writing pallet and he slept with one cheek pressed to the love poem to Tanith on the golden scroll. The lamp flames smoked and faded and died.

Rough hands shook him awake in the dawn, and he looked up groggily. It was Mursil, the huntmaster.

‘The Gry-Lion sends for you, Holiness. The hounds are in leash, and the slave-masters assembled. Two of the king’s slaves have run, and the king bids you join the chase.’

Even in his half-wakening state, Huy knew who the running slaves were, and he felt the sick sliding of his guts.

‘The fools,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, the stupid fools.’ Then he looked at Mursil. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I cannot - I will not go with him. I am sick, tell him I am sick.’

Sellene stood in the shadows and listened to the drunken bellowing and laughter from the king’s tent. Beneath the short cloak was concealed the leather grain-bag, a bundle of smoked meat dried into hard black sticks, and a small earthen cooking pot. There was food for two of them for four days, and by then they would be across the great river. She was fearful, and elated at the same time. They had planned this moment for two years, and many emotions played behind her round impassive face as she waited.

Timon came at last; quietly he appeared beside her with such suddenness that she gasped with fright. He took her hand, and led her away towards the perimeter of the camp. She saw that he wore a cloak also, and that a bow and quiver stood behind his shoulder and a short iron sword was belted at his waist. These were weapons forbidden to a slave, and death was the penalty for carrying them.

There were two guards at the gate of the stockade, and while Sellene spoke with them, offering favours, Timon came from the darkness behind them. He broke their necks with his bare hands, taking one in each hand and shaking them the way a dog will shake a rat. There was no outcry, and Timon laid the bodies gently beside the stockade gate and they went through.

They passed through the saucer where the elephant had been butchered, and the night was hideous with the snarling and yammering of the scavengers. Hyena and jackal fought over the bloody scraps and bone chips. With the sword bared in one hand Timon led Sellene through, and though the slinking hump-shouldered hyena followed them, moaning and sniggering, they reached the pass and started down the elephant road into the valley. The moon gave them good light, and they moved fast. They stopped only once at the ford of the stream to rest and drink a little water, then they hurried on towards the north.

Once they came upon a lion in the path. A big male whose body was ghostly grey in the moonlight, with a dark ruff of mane. They stared at each other for long seconds before the lion grunted softly and leapt into the undergrowth beside the path. He had fed recently, and the two human shapes did not interest him.

The moon, four days past full, wheeled across the star-furry sky and sank towards the dark horizon. When it set, there was only the indistinct glow of the stars to light their way, and at a steep and broken place in the path Sellene fell heavily.

Timon heard her cry out and he turned back quickly. She was lying on her side, making a soft moaning sound.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked as he dropped to his knees beside her.

‘My ankle.’ she whispered, agony making her voice husky and Timon groped down her leg. Already the ankle was hot to the touch, and as he held it he could feel it swelling, blowing up into a hard hot ball.

With the sword Timon cut strips from his cloak, and he bound the ankle tightly as Huy had taught him. He worked with frantic haste, and the worms of dread were already gnawing his guts.

When he lifted Sellene to her feet, she cried out as her weight came on the injured foot.

‘Can you walk on it?’ Timon asked, and she tried a few painful hobbling steps. She was panting with pain and her breathing whistled in her throat. She clung to Timon and shook her head hopelessly,

‘I cannot go on. Leave me here.’ Timon lowered her to the ground, and then straightened up as he discarded his weapons and her provisions. He kept only the short sword. He folded and knotted the two leather cloaks into a sling seat for Sellene, and placed it about her body. Then he looped the end over his neck and shoulder and lifted her. She was in his arms, with her own clasped about his shoulders. Half of her weight was taken by the sling, hanging about Timon’s neck. He started forward, striding out down the steep path towards the valley floor.

By mid-morning the sling had rubbed the skin from his neck, a weeping pink graze through the dark skin. The heat was strong now, that heavy oppressive heat of the valley floor sucking away the last of his energy. The spring had long gone from Timon’s step, and he reeled forward with spirit outlasting his physical strength.

On the edge of one of the glades of open grass, Timon stopped and leaned against the trunk of a mhoba-hoba tree. He was afraid to lower the girl’s body to the ground lest he could not find the strength to lift it again. His lips were white and rimmed with dried spittle, and his eyes were laced with red veins. His chest heaved and shook with his breathing.

‘Leave me, Timon,’ Sellene whispered, ‘This way both of us will die.’

Timon did not answer, but gestured her to silence with an impatient inclination of his head. He held his breath and listened. She heard it also then, the faint and distant baying of the hound pack.

He said, ‘It is too late for that.’ And he looked about quickly tor a place to stand. They could not hope to outrun the dogs.

‘You can still escape,’ she urged him. ‘The river is not far.’

‘Without you there is no escape,’ he said, and she clung to him as he carried her across the glade to a place where the mother rock outcropped. A jumble of fragmented granite like the ruins of an ancient castle.

He laid her gently amongst the rocks, with her back against one of the slabs. He folded her cloak and placed it as a pillow for her head, then he squatted beside her and caressed her face and neck with a surprisingly gentle touch for so big a man.

‘They will kill us,’ Sellene said. ‘They always kill those who run.’

Timon did not answer, but his fingers stroked her cheek lightly.

‘They kill in the worst way,’ Sellene said, turning her head to look at him. ‘Would it not be better if we died now, before the dogs come?’ But he did not answer, and after a while she went on. ‘You have the sword, Timon. Will you not use it?’

‘If the little priest is with them, then we have a chance. He has power over the king - and there is a thing between him and me. There is a bond. He will save us.’

The dogs were closer now, and it seemed that their baying had become more urgent as the scent ran hotter, Timon stood up and unsheathed the sword. He went out amongst the rocks and looked back towards the escarpment. Half a mile back the pack streamed from the forest into the glade. There were thirty of the tall sinewy hounds, long-legged and with rough ginger-brown coats and the heads and fangs of wolves. They were bred to chase and drag down the quarry.

Timon felt his skin tighten and prickle as he watched them string out across the glade towards him. Behind them, running on the heels of the pack were the handlers, with their distinctive green tunics and the dog-whips over their shoulders.

Beyond them again came the war elephants, five of them with the knights and slave-masters in their castles. The elephants followed the pack easily, in that ambling gait which could cover fifty miles in a day.

Timon shaded his eyes and tried to pick out the distinctive figure of the priest amongst the men in the castles. They were too far off still, but the hounds were closing swiftly.

He wrapped his cloak carefully about his left forearm, and settled his grip on the sword, swinging the weapon in a short arc to stretch his muscles.

The leading hounds saw him amongst the rocks, and immediately the deep regular baying changed to an excited yammering. Their ears flattened as they ran, and long pink tongues flopped over white fangs in the wolf jaws, and they fanned out across his front.

Timon stepped back into the opening where Sellene lay, guarding her from the vicious clamouring rush of brown bodies.

The first hound rushed in at him, with its jaws snapping, and it leapt at his face.

Timon took him on the point, in the base of his throat, killing the dog instantly, but before he could clear his blade another had sprung at him. He thrust his cloaked arm into its jaws, and hacked at a third hound.

They swarmed over him as he stabbed and hacked and thrust. He swung the hound that hung on his arm against the rock beside him, crushing in its ribs, but another had locked its fangs in his calf and was tugging him cruelly off balance. He drove the point into its shaggy back and the hound shrieked and released him.

Another went for his face and he struck at its head with the sword hilt. A great furry body smashed into his chest, a tang ripped his shoulder muscles.

There were too many of them, overwhelming him, ripping and tearing at him, smothering him with their weight and strength. He went down on his knees, holding a frothing slavering animal away from his throat and face with one hand, strangling it, but he felt other teeth slashing at his back and belly and thighs.

Then abruptly the dog-handlers were there, whipping the pack away from him, shouting to the animals by name, dragging them back and leashing them in the strangling collars.

Slowly Timon pulled himself up onto his feet. He had lost his sword, and blood streamed down his shining black body from the deep cuts and lacerations that covered him.

He looked up at the war elephant which towered over him. His last hope faded as he saw that Huy Ben-Amon was not amongst the hunters - and that Lannon Hycanus, the Gry-Lion of Opet was laughing.

‘A good run, slave,’ Lannon laughed. ‘I thought that you might reach the river.’ He looked beyond Timon to where Sellene lay. ‘My huntmasters were correct, then. They judged by the sign that the woman had damaged her leg and that you were carrying her. A noble gesture, slave, most unusual for a pagan. All the same it will cost you dear.’ Lannon looked away to one of his slave-masters. ‘There seems little to be gained by returning with them. Execute them here.’

Timon looked up at the king and spoke in a strong clear voice.

‘I am the living symbol of that love,’ he said, and Lannon’s head jerked around as he remembered the words. With the laughter gone from his lips he stared at the bleeding slave king, meeting those smoky yellow eyes. For long seconds, Timon’s life teetered on the verge of extinction, then suddenly Lannon’s eyes dropped away from those of Timon.

‘Very well,’ he nodded. ‘You remind me of my duty to a friend. I will honour it, but I swear you will live to curse the moment you spoke those words. You will live - but in life you will long for the sweetness of death.’ Lannon’s face was a mask of cold anger, as he turned back to his slave-masters. ‘This man will not be executed, but he is declared “incorrigible” and he will be chained with a weight of two talents.’ Almost a hundred pounds’ weight of chains to be carried night and day, waking and sleeping. ‘Send him to the mines at Hulya, tell the overseer there that he is to be used at the deep levels.’

Lannon watched Timon’s face as he went on. ‘The woman cannot claim my protection, but we will take her back with us, none the less. Let her be chained to the castle of one of the war elephants and marched.’

For the first time Timon showed emotion. He stepped forward and in appeal lifted one badly savaged arm from which the dark tattered flesh hung.

‘My lord, the woman is hurt. She cannot walk.’

‘She will walk,’ said Lannon. ‘Or she will be dragged. You will ride upon the elephant and encourage her. You will have time to decide if the swift death I offered you would not have been preferable to the life you have chosen.’

They chained Sellene at the wrists with a light marching chain twenty paces long. The other end of the chain was shackled to the rear wall of the elephant castle.

Timon, wearing his massive chains at neck and ankles, was seated in the castle. He was made to face backwards to where Sellene stood swaying slightly on one leg, favouring her grotesquely swollen ankle. Her face was greyish with pain, but she tried to smile up at Timon.

The first jerk of the chain as the elephant started forward pulled her face downwards on the hard earth, with its sharp shales and harsh clumps of razor grass. She was dragged fifty paces before she managed to roll onto her feet again and hop and stumble after the striding elephant. Her knees and elbows were raw, and there were scratches across her belly and breasts.

She fell and regained her feet a dozen times, each time her body was more battered and torn. She went down for the last time a little before sunset.

As Timon sat in the castle, draped in his chains, he swore an oath. In his anger and grief and pain he swore an oath of vengeance, watching Sellene’s lifeless body bounce and slide over the rough places, leaving a damp brown smear across the dry red African earth. Then Timon wept, for the last time in his life he succumbed to tears. They ran down his face and dripped from his chin to mingle with the blood and dust that caked his body.

Huy filled a wine bowl from one of his choice amphorae, one that he had set aside for a rare occasion. He was humming softly to himself, and there was a small smile which came and went upon his lips and made his dark eyes sparkle.

He had returned to Opet in the middle of the night, slept five hours and now, bathed and dressed in his best linen, he had sent a slave to summon the oracle of Opet to meet with him. All the blood and passion of these last weeks upon the escarpment of the great river were forgotten now in his anticipation of his reunion with Tanith. Forgotten were the memories of Sellene’s mutilated corpse dragged into camp behind the war elephant, the tall figure of Timon bowed beneath his chains and grief, led away by the slave-masters, those terrible accusing eyes turned towards Huy, the manacled wrists lifted in a gesture of menace or of appeal - Huy could not guess which. Then the slave-master’s whip hissing and snapping across the purple black shoulders, lifting a welt as thick as a finger without cutting the skin. For the first time since it had happened Huy was free of it, his whole being taken up with the joy of his love.

Pursing his lips thoughtfully he let four drops of the clear liquid drop from the blue glass vial into the wine. He stoppered the bottle and stirred the wine with his forefinger, sucking his finger thoughtfully and wrinkling his nose at the faint musty taste of the opiate. He added a little wild honey to mask it, tasted again and at last satisfied he set the bowl on one of the wooden stools beside the pile of cushions. There was a dish of cakes and sweetmeats there already. Huy covered the wine bowl with a silken cloth, then surveyed his preparations with pleasure. He picked up his lute, and climbed the staircase to the parapet of the roof and seated himself. He tuned the instrument and strummed upon it, loosening his voice and fingers, watching the narrow lane that led up to the front gate.

In the bright morning sunlight the lake waters were a cheery blue, only slightly darker than the sky The breeze had flecked the surface with little floppy waves, and one of Hab-bakuk Lal’s galleys had shipped her oars and was running in towards the harbour under a big lateen sail. The sea birds followed her, planing and soaring across her stern.

High above the lake the midday clouds were building tall, frothy thunder-heads. There would be rain before sunset, Huy thought, feeling the thunder in the air, in the touch of his garments upon his skin and the curl of his beard.

His breath caught, and the music died under his fingers as two figures turned into the lane and came up towards the gate. They wore the coarse brown-hooded robes that the priestesses of Astarte affected while travelling abroad. However, the bulky garments could not disguise the quick step and youthful carriage of the taller figure that hurried ahead, nor the age and aggravation of the bent figure that hobbled after her. The ancient voice, breathless and high, called with exasperation.

‘My lady, slower! I pray you.’ And Huy grinned. A slave opened the gate, and as they crossed the courtyard Huy struck a single authoritative note on the lute, and Tanith stopped dead. The old chaperone, unhearing, moved on into the house mumbling and muttering while Tanith looked up at Huy upon the parapet of the roof.

He began to sing, and the girl below him lifted the hood from her face and let it fall back on her shoulders. She shook her hair loose, watching his face with large green eyes and her expression was rapt and solemn. He sang the song he had written in the wilderness, the song to Tanith inscribed in the golden book, and as he let the last sweet note fall on the bright morning, Tanith’s cheeks were flushed and her lips trembled.

Huy went down the staircase and stood close to her, without touching her.

‘You are my soul,’ he said gently, and she swayed towards him as if drawn by a force beyond her control.

‘My lord, I cannot trust myself to be with you where other eyes may see us. I fear I shall betray my love to the blindest of them. Be strong for me.’

Huy touched her elbow, guiding her towards the house. As they passed through into the main room, Tanith stumbled slightly, for a moment pressed against him.

‘Oh! I cannot bear it,’ she said, and Huy’s voice shook as he answered.

‘In a while, my love, In a very short while.’

The old priestess was seated on the cushions already, mouthing a cake with bald gums, dropping crumbs and spittle down her robe and mumbling bitterly about her pains and aches.

Huy moved around behind her, and picked up the prepared wine bowl in both hands. Secure in the old priestess’s deafness he asked Tanith, ‘Is she strong?’

‘As strong as most men,’ Tanith smiled. ‘Though she’ll not admit it.’

‘She does not complain of chest pains or shortness of breath?’

‘Never.’ Tanith was intrigued. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I have placed star-drops in her wine,’ Huy explained. ‘But I do not want her sleep to be eternal.’

Tanith’s smile flamed, lighting the green depths of her eyes and sparkling on her teeth. ‘Oh, Holy Father, how clever of you.’ She clapped her hands, a childlike gesture that never failed to touch Huy to the core of his being.

‘How many drops?’ Tanith demanded

‘Four,’ Huy admitted.

‘Perhaps a few more would not hurt her,’ Tanith said. ‘I have not seen you in many weeks, Holiness. There is much to discuss.’

During this exchange the old priestess had been nodding and grimacing intelligently, quite as though she had understood every word. Huy studied her a moment, then firmly thrust aside the temptation.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Four is sufficient.’ And he came around in front of the priestess. The wrinkled monkey-like face split into a huge toothless grin and she reached for the bowl with a pair of bony claws, on which the old-age blotches and blue veins stood out clearly.

‘You have a kind heart. Holiness,’ she keened.

They seated themselves in front of her, and while they talked they watched her anxiously. The crone was drawing out her pleasure, sipping the wine and rolling it noisily around her mouth before swallowing and smacking her gums.

‘Since we have been apart, I have thought much upon what has happened between us,’ Huy admitted, without looking at Tanith.

‘I have thought of nothing else.’

‘As a man whose life is devoted to the service of the gods, I was greatly troubled that we had sinned against them,’ Huy told her.

‘There can be no sin in something which gives so much pleasure and happiness.’

‘I asked the gods to set a test for me, a trial of my sins.’ Huy had still not looked at her, but Tanith glanced at him sharply and her voice snapped.

‘You did not indulge in foolish risk, did you?’

‘The trial was a fair one - the gods were not cheated.’ Huy wanted her to understand, and she understood too well.

‘I forbid you to do these stupid male things. I shiver to think of what madness you committed out there in the wilderness.’ She was angry now.

‘It was necessary. They must have the opportunity to express their wrath.’

‘They could as readily express their wrath with a lightning bolt or a falling tree! I will not have you provoking them to destroy you.’

‘Tanith, please let me—’

‘I can see, my lord, that you will require stricter supervision in the future. I want a lover not a hero.’

‘But, Tanith, the gods’ answer was favourable. Don’t you see, now we need feel no guilt.’

‘I never felt guilt, then or now. But, Holiness, I will feel wrath beside which that of the gods will pale if again you risk your life needlessly.’

Huy turned to her, and shook his head with mock sorrow.

‘Oh Tanith, what would I ever do without you?’ And her stern expression softened.

‘My lord, that question will never arise.’ And at that moment the empty wine bowl slipped from the old priestess’s fingers and spun on one end across the mud floor. Its circles narrowed, until it settled into silence and the priestess let out a long contented snore and bowed forward. Huy caught her and eased her backwards onto the cushions. He laid her out comfortably, and arranged her robe modestly about her. She was smiling and burbling and whistling in her sleep.

Huy straightened up and Tanith stood close beside him. They turned to each other and embraced, coming together slowly and carefully. Her lips had a glossy feeling, cool and firm. Her soft hair brushed his cheeks, and her body pressed boldly against his.

‘Tanith,’ he whispered. ‘Oh Tanith, there is so much I want to tell you.’

‘My Lord, your voice is the most beautiful I have ever heard. Your wisdom and wit are celebrated throughout the four kingdoms - but please do not talk now.’

Tanith pulled gently out of his embrace, took his hand and led him softly from the room.

Over the months that followed, Tanith’s chaperone developed a peculiar taste for Huy’s wine. At the temple feasts she was wont to disparage the quality of the wine served by the Reverend Mother, comparing it most unfavourably against the other, and she would always end with a word of praise for the Holy Father himself.

‘A dear, dear man,’ she would tell her audience. ‘None of the nonsense you find with some of the others. Did I ever tell you about Rastafa Ben-Amon, the Holy Father in the reign of the forty-fourth Gry-Lion when I was a novice? Now there was a one!’ Her old eyes went a little misty, and she drooled a thread of saliva.

‘Drink!’ She said with outraged virtue. ‘Fight! And other things.’ Then she nodded sagely. ‘A terrible, terrible man!’ And she grinned fondly at her ancient memories.

From the leather pipe, with its pitch-sealed joints, feeble gusts of air puffed like the dying breaths of a dinosaur. Driven by the great bellows at the surface, the circulation of fresh air had lost most of its force here, seventy feet below.

Timon leaned against the sweating rock surface, pressing his face to the hose outlet gasping at that scanty trickle of air in the hellish heat and sulphurous atmosphere of the underground workings. He was lean, every rib showed clearly through the black skin, each sinewy muscle was outlined. His head was skull-like, with gaunt cheekbones and deep eye-sockets in which the smouldering fires of his indomitable spirit still burned.

All fat and spare flesh had been burned off him by the ceaseless toil and the heat. Even now a sheen of moisture squeezed from the pores of his skin, highlighting the scars which criss-crossed his back and curled around his rib-cage -scars that patterned his arms and legs, scars long healed into thick ridges and shiny grooves, scars fresh and pink, scars still thick-scabbed and oozing. The chain shackles hung loosely at his neck and wrists and ankles. They had rubbed coarse calloused circles around his neck and limbs, slave marks that he would carry to his grave.

He sucked in the air, his chest pumping, swelling and subsiding, the ribs beneath the skin fanning open and closing. Around him the smoke swirled, dimming the lamp flames. The heat was a violent shimmering thing, and the rock at the face glowed still, although the fires had burned to thick beds of ash.

For five days now they had been attempting to break up this intrusion of hard green serpentine rock which was obscuring the gold reef. Sixteen men had died in the attempt, suffocated by the steam and smoke, struck down by flying shards of exploding rock or merely overcome by the heat to fall swooning onto the glowing floor and to sizzle while their flesh stuck to the hot rock and came away in stinking slabs from the bone.

From the shaft above him, dangling on a plaited reed rope, one of the water-bladders was lowered to him. Made from the whole skin of an ox, carefully stitched and with the joints waterproofed with pitch the bladder contained forty gallons of liquid, a mixture of sour wine and water.

Timon doused his leather cloak in the filthy warm water of the wooden trough beside him, then one at a time he lifted his feet and dipped them into the trough, soaking his leather leggings and the sandals. The soles of the sandals were reinforced with five thicknesses of leather to withstand the heat of the rock floor. Timon threw the cloak across his shoulders, bound the linen cloth over his mouth and nose, took one last breath from the air pipe and held it. Then he ducked under the dangling water bladder and took the weight on his shoulders. Reaching up, he jerked loose the tail of the knot that held it, and, bowed under the weight of liquid, he staggered up the tunnel.

As he approached the face, the wet soles of his sandals began spluttering and stinking. He could feel the heat through the thick leather. Heat from the rock walls hammered at him, a physical force against which he had to fight his way forward.

There was little time in which to work. Already his abused lungs were pumping painfully, but he dared not draw a breath of this poisonous smoke-laden air. The heat was scalding the exposed skin on his arms and face, his feet were agony as the rock burned away the protective soles.

Against the face of the drive, he eased the bladder from his shoulder. He moaned with the pain as his careless elbow touched the rock, searing away an inch of skin and leaving the pink raw flesh exposed.

He lowered the bladder to the floor, whirled and ran back through swirling fumes and heat down the tunnel with his chains jangling loosely under the cloak. This was the moment when men died, when the hot rock ate through the water bladder too swiftly, before the bearer was out of the danger area.

Behind Timon the bladder popped, forty gallons of liquid drenched the hot rock, the sudden contraction of the strata shattered the surface, the rock burst explosively and a sharp sliver of it hit Timon in the back of the head, a glancing razor touch that sliced down to the bone of his skull. He staggered, knowing that to fall on this burning floor was to die horribly. He kept his feet while with his senses reeling he reached the water trough and plunged his head quickly into the filthy scummy water. Then with dirty water and fresh blood streaming down his back, he clutched the air pipe with both hands and panted into it. He was coughing and retching and his eyes were blinded with the tears of pain.

It took him minutes to recover a little of his strength, and he staggered to the ladder that led to the level above. As he climbed, the next water bladder was being lowered, and he squeezed himself against the side of the narrow shaft to allow it past. He climbed fifty feet in darkness and then crawled over the edge into a dimly lit low-roofed cavern.

The slave-master saw him grovelling on the lip of the shaft.

‘Why have you left your station?’ And the long lash of the hippo-hide kiboko curled wickedly around Timon’s ribs. He writhed at the sting of it.

‘My head,’ he gasped. ‘I’m hurt.’ And the slave-master stepped closer to him, stooping to examine the clotted cut in the back of Timon’s scalp from which dark blood still welled. He grunted impatiently,

‘Rest, then.’ And turned to a row of ten squatting slaves. They were all incorrigibles, wearing the same heavy chains as Timon, and their bodies were also scarred and abused. The slave-master selected one of them, prodding him with the sharpened point of the whip.

‘You next. Quickly now. The slave stood, and shuffled to the mouth of the shaft, moving stiffly for the damp of the workings was in all their bones. At the edge of the shaft the slave paused and peered fearfully into that dreadful fuming pit.

‘Move!’ grunted the slave-master and the kiboko whistled and clapped against his flesh. He went down the ladder.

Timon dragged himself to the low bench against the wall. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. His lungs ached with the smoke and the cut in his scalp burned and stung. None of the other slaves looked at him. Each man was sunk in his own private hell, uncaring and silent. Beside Timon a man began to cough, a monotonous hacking sound, and a little bloody saliva wet his lips and glistened in the lamp light. He was dying of the lung sickness of the miners. The dust of powdered rock had filled his lungs, solidifying like concrete and turning his lungs to stone. None of them moved, none of them spoke.

The younger slave-master paced restlessly back and forth before them. He was a swarthy bearded man, part Yuye, a freedman as like as not. He wore a linen tunic with light body armour, enough to turn a dagger’s point, and an iron helmet to protect his skull from the rough roof of the tunnel. At his waist were belted a short iron sword and a slave club studded with iron nails. He was tall and hard-looking, with flat sinewy muscle in his arms and legs. A cruel man, selected to work with the incorrigibles because of his brutality. There were always two of them. The other slave-master was an older man with a frosting of grey in his beard and a pale sickly-looking face. But he was big in the shoulder, and dangerous, as cruel as the younger man and more experienced. From above, five bladders of liquid were lowered into the shaft, and five times a thick rush of steam swirled from the dark mouth as they were used to quench the heated rock.

‘Enough!’ the younger slave-master bellowed down, and the slave crawled up out of the pit and lay on the edge coughing and retching. He was filthy with ash and sweat and mud, and he vomited a little yellow bile into the mud.

‘Take him away,’ ordered the slave-master and two of them shambled forward and dragged him away to the bench.

The younger slave-master’s eyes travelled along the row, and they stiffened into awareness, each trying to will the choice away from himself.

‘You.’ The sharp point of the whip dug spitefully into Timon’s ribs. ‘You did not finish your shift.’

There was no right of appeal, protest was folly, Timon had learned long ago. He stood up, and shuffled to the shaft. He steeled himself to the descent, but the delay was too long, and the hippo-hide whip seared its white flash of agony across the tenderness beneath his armpit.

It began as a reflex of pain, Timon lifted his arms to protect himself and the chains swung. In a sudden orgasm of anger and pain, Timon whirled the heavy links just as the slave-master swung the next whip stroke. The chain wrapped about the slave-master’s forearm and the bone snapped with a sharp brittle sound.

He backed away with a startled cry, and his broken arm dangled loosely at his side. Behind him the older man drew his sword. It came out of the scabbard with a harsh rasp. He was fifty paces away down the tunnel.

Two of them now, for the younger man was groping left-handed for his sword. Somewhere beneath the slave dullness, the blankness of the slave animal mind, a spark burned. Huy Ben-Amon’s training came back to Timon: of two enemies -separate them and attack the weaker first.

Flailing the chain Timon leapt at the younger slave-master, and the man went down in the mud.

Timon leapt over him, and caught the second man’s sword stroke on the iron shackle at his wrist. The blow jarred him to the shoulder, and numbed his arm, but he ran in under the next stroke and threw a twist of the chain about the man’s throat. He drew tight and held it.

The older man dropped his sword and clutched desperately at Timon’s hands, at the links of iron that were strangling him.

Timon found that he was growling like a dog as he jerked and twisted the chain tighter. Suddenly the slave-master’s hands dropped away, his tongue fell out between slack and swollen lips and there was the sharp acrid odour of faeces as his sphincter muscle relaxed. Timon let him down onto the floor, and picked up his sword from the mud.

He turned to the younger slave-master who had crawled to his knees, still stunned. He had lost his helmet, and he was cradling his broken arm against his chest.

Timon stood over him and with the short sword chopped his skull open. The slave-master fell face downwards into the mud.

Timon stood back and looked about the drive quickly. From the first blow to the last only ten seconds had passed, and there had been no outcry.

Timon looked down at the sword in his hand, the blade was dulled with mud and blood, but he felt the despondency of abject slavery fall away. He felt the spark burst into flame, felt himself become a man again.

He looked at the other slaves sitting on the bench. Not one of them had moved. Their eyes were dull, incurious. They were not men. Timon felt a chill as he looked at them. He needed men. He must have men.

There was one of them. His name was Zama. A young man of Timon’s age. A wild slave, taken beyond the river. He had not worn his chains for a year yet. Timon stared at him, and saw his eyes come into focus, saw his chin lift and the muscles in his jaw clench.

‘Hammer!’ Timon commanded. ‘Bring a hammer!’ Zama stirred. It was an effort of will for him to break the pattern of slavery.

‘Hurry,’ said Timon. ‘There is little time.’

Zama picked up one of the short-handled iron-headed mining adzes, and stood up from the bench.

Timon felt his heart soar within him. He had found a man. He held out his wrists, with the bloody sword in his hand.

‘Strike off these chains,’ he said.

Lannon Hycanus was pleased, but trying not to make it obvious. He stood by the window, and looked down towards the harbour where five galleys lay against the stone jetty. Lannon twisted a curl of his beard about one finger, and smiled secretly.

In the room behind him Rib-Addi was reading in his prim and precise voice, combing his fingers through his scraggly grey beard.

‘Into Opet this day from the southern plains of grass, fifty-eight large tusks of ivory, in all sixty-nine talents.’

Lannon turned quickly, a scowl masking his pleasure.

‘You attended the weighing?’ he demanded.

‘As always, my lord,’ Rib-Addi assured him, and his clerks looked up from their writings, saw the Gry-Lion’s expression soften and they grinned and bobbed their heads ingratiatingly.

‘Ah!’ Lannon grunted, and turned back to the window, while Rib-Addi resumed his reading. The voice was monotonous, and Lannon found his attention wandering although his subconscious was alert for a false note in the book-keeper’s voice. Rib-Addi had the habit of raising his voice slightly whenever he reached a portion of the accounting which might cause the Gry-Lion’s displeasure - a lower return, an estimate unfulfilled - and immediately Lannon pounced on him. This convinced Rib-Addi that the Gry-Lion was a financial genius, and that he could hide nothing from him.

Lannon’s mind drifted away, picking idly at stray thoughts, turning over mental stones to see what scurried out from under. He thought of Huy, and felt a cold breeze ruffle the surface of his contentment. There was a flaw in their friendship. Huy had changed towards Lannon, and he searched for the reason. He discarded the thought that it might be the aftermath of their long estrangement. It was something else. Huy was withdrawn, secretive. Seldom would he spend his nights in the palace, sharing the dice and wine and laughter with Lannon. Often when Lannon sent for him in the night, instead of Huy arriving with his lute slung on his shoulder and a new ballad to sing, the slave would return with a message that Huy was sick or sleeping or writing.

Lannon frowned now. and at that moment he heard the telltale rise in Rib-Addi’s voice and he swung around and glared at them.

‘What?’ he bellowed, and their faces were yellow-white with fright. The clerks ducked their heads over their scrolls.

‘My lord, there was a heavy fall of rock in the southern end of the mine,’ Rib-Addi stuttered. It ceased to amaze him that from a mass of figures Lannon would instantly pounce on a ten per cent decrease of output from one of the dozens of tiny mines of the middle kingdom.

‘Who is the overseer?’ Lannon demanded, and ordered the man replaced.

‘It is carelessness, and I will not have it so,’ Lannon told him. ‘The yield is affected, valuable slaves wasted. I would rather spend more on shoring timber, it is cheaper so in the end.’

Rib-Addi dictated the order to one of the clerks, and Lannon turned back to the window and his thoughts of Huy. He remembered how it had been before, how Huy’s presence had provided the zest that made each triumph more valuable, and each disappointment or disaster easier to surmount. All the good things happened when Huy was there.

In a rare moment of self-honesty Lannon realized that Huy Ben-Amon was the only human being that he could look upon as a friend.

His position had isolated him from all others. He could not approach them for the warmth and comfort that even a king needs. His wives, his children feared him. They were uneasy in his presence, and left it with obvious relief.

In all his kingdom there was only one person with the blend of courage, honesty, and disregard of consequence which allowed him to live in the king’s presence without shrivelling.

‘I need him,’ Lannon thought. ‘I need him much more than he needs me. Everybody loves him, but he is the only one who truly loves me.’ And he grimaced as he remembered how Huy had defied him, and it was he, Lannon Hycanus the forty-seventh Gry-Lion of Opet, who had suffered most during the estrangement.

‘I will not let him go again,’ he vowed. ‘I will not let him draw away from me like this.’ And his self-honesty persisted. He saw that he was jealous of his priest. ‘I will destroy anything which comes between us. I need him.’

He thought of this latest journey of Huy Ben-Amon’s. Was it truly a matter of such urgency that the High Priest must travel 400 miles, taking with him two cohorts of his legion and the priestess and oracle of Opet, to consecrate some minor shrine to the goddess at a desolate garrison outpost in the northern kingdom? Lannon thought it more likely that Huy was leaving Opet for some devious reason of his own, and the result was that Lannon was bored, lonely and irritable. Huy knew that Lannon had planned a feast for his name-day.

The clash of urgent armoured feet interrupted Lannon’s thoughts. He turned from the window as three of his high officers burst into the room. With them was a centurion in dusty cloak and unburnished armour. There was dust in his beard and dust coated his sandals and greaves. He had travelled fast.

‘My lord. News of the worst possible kind.’

‘What is it?’

‘A slave rising.’

‘Where?’

‘At Hulya.’

‘How many?’

‘A great many. We are not sure. This man,’ indicating the centurion, ‘has seen it.’

Lannon turned to the weary officer. ‘Speak!’ he ordered.

‘I was on patrol, Majesty. Fifty men on a sweep to the north. We saw the smoke, but by the time we returned to the mine it was finished. They had opened the compounds, slaughtered the garrison.’ He paused, remembering the dead men with their bowels ripped open and the bloody mush of castration between their legs. ‘They had gone, all except the sick and the lame. Those they left.’

‘How many?’

‘About 200.’

‘What did you do with them?’

‘We put them to the sword.’

Good!‘ Lannon nodded. ’Continue.‘

‘We followed after the main party of slaves. There were more than 5,000 when they left Hulya, and they moved northwards.’

‘Northwards,’ Lannon growled. ‘The river, of course.’

‘They are moving slowly, very slowly. And they plunder and burn as they go. We could follow them by the smoke and the vultures. The population ahead of them flees, leaving all to them. They devour the land like locusts.’

‘How many? How many?’ Lannon demanded. ‘We must know!’

‘They have opened the compounds at Hulya, and Tuye and a dozen other mines - all the field slaves have flocked to join them,’ the centurion answered.

One of the officers hazarded. ‘There must be 30,000 of them, then?’

‘At least, Majesty,’ the centurion agreed.

‘Thirty thousand, in Baal’s holy name,’ whispered Lannon. ‘Such a multitude!’ Then his anger came and he spoke harshly. ‘What force have we to oppose their march? How many legions are mobilized.’

‘There are two legions at Zeng,’ an officer volunteered,

‘We could not move them in time,’ Lannon answered,

‘One legion here at Opet.’

Too far, too far,‘ Lannon growled.

‘And two more along the south bank of the great river.’

‘And they are scattered in garrisons spread over a distance of 500 miles. All the others are disbanded?’ Lannon asked. ‘How long to call them up?’

‘Ten days.’

‘Too long,’ Lannon snapped. ‘We must put down this rising with the uttermost ruthlessness. Rebellion is a plague, it spreads like fire in dry papyrus beds. We must isolate it, and quench it. Every spark of it. What other force have we?’

‘There is His Holiness,’ one of the officers murmured diffidently, and Lannon stared at him. He had forgotten Huy. ‘He is at Sinai, directly in the slaves’ line of march to the north.’

‘Huy!’ said Lannon softly, and then was silent while his officers plunged into an animated discussion.

‘He has only two cohorts with him - 1,200 men - he would not engage an army of 30,000.

‘No army, but a slave rabble.’

‘Thirty thousand, none the less.’

‘We cannot reinforce him in time.’

‘It would be folly to try odds like that - and, my lord, Ben-Amon is no fool.’

‘The nearest reserves are at Sett on the river.’

‘Ben-Amon will not fight,’ one of them declared, and they looked to Lannon for his opinion.

Lannon smiled. ‘Content yourselves. Ben-Amon will fight. At a time and a place of his own choosing His Holiness will fight.’ Then the smile was gone. ‘I will march in four hours with all available troops to support Ben-Amon. Issue mobilization orders to all the disbanded legions, send runners to Zeng.’

‘Will there be a battle?’ Tanith asked. Her eyes sparkled green with anticipation, and her lips were parted expectantly. ‘I mean, a real battle like the ones you sing about?’

Huy grunted without looking up from his writing pallet where he was formulating his orders to the garrison commander at Sett.

‘Gather to you all troops within your sector and hold them within your walls. Account to me for your store of javelins, arrows and other weapons. What force of elephant do you command? Command the galleys of the river patrol to an-chor beneath your walls and await my orders. Inform me of the level of the river. What fords are passable?

‘I will join you within six days to assume command. It is my intention to dispute the enemies’ passage of the river at—’

Tanith slipped off the couch and crossed the tent. She came up behind Huy and put a finger in his ear.

‘My lord.’

‘Please, Tanith. I am busy on affairs of moment. This is urgent.’

‘No more urgent than a reply to my question - will there be a battle?’

‘Yes,’ Huy replied testily. ‘Yes, there will.’

‘Oh, good!’ Tanith clapped her hands. ‘I have never watched a real battle.’

‘Nor will you now!’ replied Huy grimly as he resumed his writing. ‘You will leave tomorrow morning on a war elephant with an escort of fifty men. You are going home to Opet until this trouble is over.’

Tanith returned to the couch and plumped herself down upon it with the skirts of her tunic drawn up wantonly about her smooth thighs. She glared at the back of Huy’s head, and her lips compressed into a stubborn line.

‘That, Holy Father,’ she whispered inaudibly, ‘may be your plan!’

Tanith lay unsleeping and listened to the voices of Huy and his officers as they planned the campaign. Her tent was placed conveniently close to that of the High Priest, and the unlit space between them could be crossed without observation by the sentries. This journey to Sinai had been planned by Huy as a love tryst, an escape for them from the restraints of Opet.

Across the tent from her, Aina, the ancient priestess, burbled and muttered in her sleep. Tanith picked up one of her sandals from beside the couch and threw it at her. Aina hiccupped and subsided into silence.

Tanith was too excited by the momentous events in which she had been caught up for her to even contemplate sleep. A savage slave army was trundling down upon them, tens of thousands of wild men, leaving behind them a wide swathe of rape and slaughter and fire-blackened earth.

All that day the refugees had poured into the camp, each of them bringing fresh tales of horror and death. To oppose these savages was Huy Ben-Amon and his small band of heroes, outnumbered twenty to one. It was the stuff of legend, and Tanith would not miss a moment of it. In her mind the outcome was assured, in the ballads the hero always triumphed. He was the favourite of the gods, and therefore invincible. It was a pity merely that the favourite of the gods in the usual masculine fashion was being tiresome, but Tanith had laid her plans.

It was long after midnight before Tanith heard the officers taking loud leave of Huy, and clumping away to their own tents. She sat up, and started to induce tears to flood her eyes. She could usually achieve this by remembering a puppy she had owned as a child. A leopard had taken it. Tonight the trick would not work and she had to resort to rubbing her eyes with her knuckles.

Huy lay on his couch, with the lamp wick trimmed low so the corners of the tent were in darkness. He came up quickly on one elbow when Tanith slipped in through the tent flap, and before he could speak she had thrown herself on the couch beside him and wrapped her arms about his neck. She was shivering violently.

‘What is it, my heart?’ Huy was alarmed.

‘Oh my lord, a dream. A dream of ill omen.’ And Huy felt icy little prickles of dread upon the back of his neck. In two years he had learned that Tanith was truly possessed of the gift of prescience. She was capable of vivid glimpses of the future, from small incidents to matters of the gravest moment. If Huy primed her on the course her prophesies should take, it was only on the more mundane consultations. He had, however, developed a hearty respect for her abilities. Tanith knew this as she whispered, ‘I walked upon a night field lit only by the funeral fires.’ And Huy held her closer, feeling the chill spreading through his body - night, funeral fires, ill-omens indeed.

‘I was weeping, my lord. I do not know why, but there was a great sense of loss. There had been a battle. The field was littered with weapons, and broken shields. I came upon the standard of the sixth legion, the sunbird, broken and discarded in the dirt.’ Huy shuddered with awe, the sunbird thrown down! It was not only the symbol of his legion, but his own personal totem.

‘Then our Lady Astarte was with me. She also was weeping. Silver tears that ran down across her white face. She was very beautiful and very sad. She spoke to me, chiding me sorrowfully. “You should have stayed with him, Tanith. This would never have happened if you had stayed with him.” ’

Huy felt the quick stab of doubt through his superstitious awe. He placed his hands on Tanith’s shoulders and held her away to study her face. Her eyes were reddened, and tears had washed her cheeks, but still he was suspicious. It seemed a little too neat, and he had learned that when Tanith set her heart on something she was not easily put off.

‘Tanith,’ he said severely. ‘You know how grave a matter it is to misrepresent the words of the gods.’

Tanith nodded fervently. ‘Oh yes, my lord.’

‘As a seeress you have a sacred duty,’ Huy insisted, and Tanith wiped her cheeks and remembered how Huy had used that sacred duty to steer the political and economic life of the nation, not to mention his personal profit. She could not deny herself a wicked pleasure in paying him in his own coin.

‘I know it well, Holy Father.’ Huy stared at her but could find no evidence of guile. Unable to withstand the scrutiny of those dark eyes a moment longer, Tanith buried her face in his neck once more and waited silently. The silence lasted a long time, before Huy finally admitted defeat.

‘Very well,’ he gruffed. ‘I will keep you with me, if that is what the goddess wants.’ And Tanith hugged him closer and smiled triumphantly into Huy Ben-Amon’s curly beard.

For five days Huy probed and tested that moving mass of humanity as it flowed on towards the great river like a vast black jelly-fish. Always he moved back, retreating ahead of it, keeping his tiny force compact and well under his hand, using it with economy and purpose.

On the fifth day he linked up with the garrison at Sett. Mago, the elderly commander, placed himself under Huy with 1,800 archers and light infantry, twelve war elephants, two patrol galleys of 100 oars each, and the garrison’s considerable arsenal.

Huy greeted him in the heated noonday on a small hill a dozen miles south of the river, and he led Mago aside out of earshot of the staff.

‘I am honoured to serve under you. Holy Father. They say there is glory for those that follow the standard of the Sun-bird.’

‘There will be enough glory for all here, I warrant you,’ Huy told him grimly, and pointed across the open forest land. ‘There they are.’

The slave army moved like a thick column of foraging ants, and a pale mist of dust rose above the trees.

‘What thought comes first to your mind, Captain?’ Huy asked quietly, and Mago studied the distant army.

‘From here, my lord, they look like any other army on the march,’ he muttered doubtfully.

‘And does that not strike you as odd? This is not an army, Mago, it is a rabble of escaped slaves. Yet it moves like an army.’

Mago nodded quickly, understanding. ‘Yes! Yes! They are in hand, you can see it. It is true, you would not expect such control.’

‘There is more to it than that,’ Huy told him. ‘You will see it demonstrated in a moment, for I have arranged a little entertainment. I believe in giving these slaves plenty of pepper in their diet. We will raid their baggage in a moment, and then you will see what I mean.’

They were silent for a moment, watching the enemy move slowly down towards them.

Then Huy asked, ‘What is the state of the river, Mago?’

‘My lord, it is very low.’

‘The ford is passable?’ Huy insisted. ‘How deep is it?’

‘It can be crossed on foot. The water at the deepest is neck-deep, but flowing fast. I have had the guide ropes cut.’

Huy nodded. ‘They are moving towards the ford at Sett. I have been sure of that from the moment when they chose the Lulule pass of the escarpment.’ Huy was silent a moment longer. ‘That is where I will destroy them,’ he went on firmly, and Mago glanced sideways at him. ‘Destroy’ seemed a strange word for a general of 3,000 men to use in connection with an army of 30,000.

‘My lord!’ one of Huy’s officers shouted. ‘The attack begins! ’ And Huy hurried across to join the group.

‘Ah!’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Bakmor has chosen his moment well.’

From their carefully prepared ambush, Bakmor’s 500 heavy infantry men charged into the flank of the column. Huy’s favourite had picked a weak spot in the protective screen of black spearmen. His axemen hacked their way through to the baggage train, and the drivers of the bullock wagons jumped from their seats and ran, the women bearers dropped the baskets of grain from their heads and followed them in a shrieking panic.

Swiftly the attackers slaughtered the oxen in their traces, and piled the grain baskets in heaps. Fire from the earthenware pots was fanned to life and within minutes the plundered food stores of the slave army were ablaze.

‘Look!’ Huy pointed out to Mago the response of the slaves to this sudden onslaught. From head and tail of the column formations of spearmen were doubling back and forward in the classical manoeuvre of envelopment. The movement was not executed with any of the precision of a trained legion. It was slow and unwieldy, a mere parody of the correct formations, but it was recognizable.

‘Remarkable!’ Mago exclaimed. ‘A soldier commands them, one at least who has read the military statutes. Your officer must be careful now.’

‘Bakmor knows what to do,’ Huy assured him, and as he spoke the distant axemen formed up quickly into the testudo formation, an armoured tortoise of shields, and they trotted out between the enclosing arms of spearmen, beating the encircling movement with minutes to spare. Behind them the baggage train burned, smearing black smoke across the tree-tops.

‘Good! Good!’ Huy grinned his pleasure and relief, slapping his thigh with pleasure. ‘Sweetly done! Now, let the slave commander show if he is as great a quartermaster as he is a tactician! There will be growling bellies in the enemy camp tonight.’ Huy took Mago’s arm and led him away. ‘A bowl of wine,’ he suggested. ‘Watching and waiting is almost as thirsty work as swinging the axe.’

Mago smiled. ‘Speaking of wine, Holiness. I have a few amphorae of wine that I am sure will give no offence even to a palate as knowledgeable as yours Will you dine with me this night?’

‘I look forward to it with the keenest anticipation,’ Huy assured him.

The wine was drinkable, and after the meal Huy and Tanith sang together for the guests. It was a fanciful piece of pornography of Huy’s composition, a love duet between Baal and Astarte. Tanith sang the part of the goddess in a sweet and true voice, rendering the more suggestive and ambiguous lines with modestly downcast eyes, that had the guests shouting with laughter and pounding the board with their wine bowls. Huy ignored the pleas for an encore, and setting his lute aside, he became serious. He spoke of the impending battle, warning Mago and his officers not to judge the enemy too lightly.

‘I nearly paid dearly for that mistake,’ he told them. ‘I was tempted to probe their centre in strength, and I found it as soft as freshly kneaded dough. I sensed a quick rout, a chance of victory at a single stroke. With their centre collapsing I would drive through them and split them.’ Huy paused, and made the sun sign. ‘Praise unto Baal, but a moment before I gave the order to commit and change the probe to a full frontal attack I was warned by an impulse from the gods.’ The company assumed expressions of suitable religious solemnity, and a few of them made the sun sign as Huy went on. ‘I looked to the enemy’s flanks which, naturally, overlapped mine, and I saw how firmly they stood. It seemed to me that the enemy’s steadiest and best troops were posted there, and I remembered Cannae. I remembered how Hannibal had enmeshed the Roman Consul.’ Huy broke off suddenly, and an expression of revelation dawned upon his face.

‘Cannae! Hannibal!’ Clearly he remembered the clay box with the battle counters of Cannae set out upon it. He remembered his own voice lecturing, and a black face intent and listening. ‘Timon!’ he whispered. ‘It’s Timon! It must be! ’

Around him lay his army, a vast agglomeration of black humanity, hungry and afraid and restless in the night. The fires blossomed like a flower garden upon the southern bank of the great river, and the night sky glowed orange. The fires were for warmth alone, there was no food. There had been no food for two days now, not since they had burned his baggage.

Timon moved silently amongst them, and saw how they huddled about the fires. Hunger had made them cold, and they whispered and moaned, so the sound of his camp was murmurous, a sibilance like the hive sound of wild bees.

He hated them. They were slaves, weaklings. One in fifty of them was a man, one in a hundred was a warrior. When he had longed for a war spear in his hands, they had been a rotten twig. They were slow and clumsy in response to the lightning sallies of the enemy. Fifty of them were no match for one of the splendid warriors that opposed him. He longed for the men of his own tribe, longed to teach them what he had learned, to imbue them with his own sense of purpose, his own dreams of destiny and retribution.

On the bank of the river he stood and looked across the slick black flow of water. The reflection of the stars danced upon the surface, and at the shallow place of the ford there were whorls and eddies, a disturbance, as though some monster swam deep.

Three hundred paces out, halfway across the river, was a small islet. The flood waters would cover it, and it was thick with driftwood and mats of stranded papyrus. This was the first stage of the ford. It was here that he would anchor his lines of twisted bark that his men were plaiting now. He would rig the lines at dawn, and attempt to make the crossing in a single day. He knew how heavy his losses must be. They were weak with hunger and wounds and exhaustion, the bark ropes were unreliable, the current was swift and treacherous, and the enemy was as swift and unrelenting.

Timon moved away downstream, passing amongst his sentries, talking quietly with them, stopping to examine the huge coils of bark rope that were laid ready upon the bank, and at last he came to the perimeter of his camp.

Downstream was the garrison of Sett, 1,000 paces away, a Roman mile as Timon now thought of it. There were torches burning upon the walls and Timon could see the sentries moving vigilantly in the light.

Out on the river, anchored in a deep placid pool were the galleys of the river patrol. With oars shipped and sails furled they were saurian in shape, and Timon watched them uneasily. He had never seen warships in action and he did not know what to expect of them. When Huy Ben-Amon had spoken of the great sea battles of the Romans and Greeks and Carthaginians, he had paid scant attention. He regretted it now. He wished he could form some estimate of the threat that these strange craft afforded his crossing.

The sound of voices came faintly to him across the water, and though he could not recognize the words, yet the familiar modulations of the Punic language fanned his hatred. He listened to them and he felt it come up out of the pit of his belly. He wanted to hurl himself upon them, and destroy them. He wanted to destroy every trace, every memory of this grotesque light-skinned people with their skills and strength and strange gods and monstrous cruelties.

Standing in the darkness and staring at the distant fortress, hearing their voices in the night, he remembered the body of his woman sliding and bouncing over the rough ground, he remembered the slaves wailing in the compounds of Hulya, he remembered the slave smell, the sound and kiss of the lash, the jangling weight of the chains, the searing heat of the rock, the voices of the slave-masters, the thousand other memories burned and branded into his brain. He massaged the thickened chain callouses at his wrist, and stared at his enemies, and from the core of his soul his hatred bubbled and boiled, threatening to flood his reason like the red-hot lava of an active volcano.

He wanted to swing his army about and fall upon them. He wanted to destroy them, destroy every last trace of them.

He found with surprise that he was shaking, his whole body shuddering with the force of his hatred, and with an immense effort of his will, he controlled himself. Sweat poured down his face and chest in the night cool, the rank-smelling sweat of hatred.

‘My time is not now,’ he thought. ‘But it will come.’

There was a presence beside him in the darkness and he turned to it.

‘Zama?’ he asked, and his lieutenant answered softly.‘

‘The dawn is coming.’

‘Yes.’ Timon nodded. ‘It is time to begin.’

With loving attention Tanith braided his beard, and then twisted it up under his chin and clubbed it out of the way where it would not catch in Huy’s breastplate nor afford a grip for a desperate enemy.

She whispered endearments as she worked, the endearments of a childless woman, speaking to him as though he were her infant. Huy sat quietly on his couch, delighting in the deft and gentle touch of her hands, the soft words and the loving tone of her voice; all this contrasted so violently with what the day would bring, and when Tanith rose from the couch and went to fetch his heavy breastplate, he felt a sharp sense of loss.

She helped him to arm, kneeling to buckle the straps of his greaves, fussing with the folds of his cloak, and although she smiled, he could hear the fear in her voice.

He kissed her awkwardly, and the iron crushed her breast as he held her. She made a small movement of protest, half pulling away, then she surrendered to his embrace and, ignoring the pain, pressed herself to him.

‘Oh Huy,’ she whispered, ‘my lord, my love.’

The old priestess pulled aside the hanging reed mat and stepped into the chamber. She saw the two of them clinging to each other, oblivious of all else. Aina stared at them through rheumy old eyes, then her mouth sagged open into a tooth-less grin and she drew back silently and let the reed mat fall into place.

Tanith drew away at last. She went to the wall against which the vulture axe leaned beside Huy’s couch, and she took it up and untied the soft leather sheath from the blade. She came to Huy, standing before him, and she lifted the blade to her lips and kissed it.

‘Fail him not!’ she whispered to the axe and handed it to Huy.

In the pre-dawn darkness there was an eager group of officers on the ramparts of the fort staring upstream to where the slave army was encamped. They were all armed and were eating the morning meal as they stood. They greeted Huy and Tanith with boisterous high spirits, and Tanith watched and listened as they discussed the day. She found it difficult to understand how they could face the possibility of dealing or receiving death with the enthusiasm of small boys for a piece of mischief.

Tanith felt herself excluded from this mysterious male camaraderie, and she was startled by the change which had come over Huy. Her gentle poet, her solemn scholar and shy lover was as inflamed as any of them. She recognized all the signs of his excitement in his fluttering hand gestures, the hectic spots of colour in his cheeks and the high-pitched giggle with which he greeted one of Bakmor’s sallies.

‘This is the day. Enough waiting,’ Huy declared, as he stared upstream into the dawn gloom. There was a heavy mist upon the river, and the smoke from 10,000 camp fires obscured the field. He paced restlessly. ‘A curse upon this mist! I cannot see if they have strung their lines across the ford yet.’

‘Shall I order one of the galleys upstream to investigate?’ Mago asked.

‘No,’ Huy waved the suggestion aside. ‘We will know soon enough, and I don’t want to draw attention to the galleys yet.’ Huy crossed to the parapet on which the food was spread. He poured a bowl of hot wine sweetened with honey and raised it to the company. ‘A bright edge to your swords!’

Huy sang the greeting to Baal as the sun came up over a red and smoky horizon, and then standing bareheaded he drew the attention of the gods to the fact that he intended fighting a battle this day. In strong but respectful terms he pointed out that though the men he commanded were the finest, yet the odds were high, and he would need assistance if the day was to be carried. He relied on them for their cooperation. He made the sun sign, and then turned briskly to his staff.

‘Very well, you know your stations and duties.’ As they dispersed, Huy led Bakmor aside. ‘You have a man to attend the priestess?’

Bakmor beckoned to a grizzled old infantry man who stood a short way off, and the man came forward.

‘You know your duties?’ Huy demanded, and the soldier nodded.

‘I will remain with the priestess through the day ’

‘Never letting her out of your sight,’ Huy cautioned him.

‘Should the enemy triumph, and it seem that she will fall into their hands, I will—’

‘Good,’ Huy interrupted him gruffly. ‘If it is necessary, make the stroke swift and sure.’

Huy could not look at Tanith, he turned away quickly and went down to where a small boat waited to row him out to the largest of the two galleys.

Huy stood on the castle of the galley and waited. The sun was well up now, and the mist was dispersed. The galley was singled up to a bow anchor, and she faced into the current. The rowers were at their benches, their shields and weapons at their feet, the oars feathered and ready.

The slave army was committed to its crossing. Twenty lines had been strung from the south bank to the mid-stream island, and now they were laying the lines from there to the north bank.

The ford was congested with a great struggling mass of humanity. Clinging to the bark ropes, they were wading steadily across towards the island. Only their heads showed, long lines of black dots around which the water swirled and creamed. Already there were fifteen or twenty thousand slaves in the water, and the number increased steadily as the horde on the south side filed down the bank and took to the ropes.

It was happening just the way that Huy had known it would. The party on the south bank would dwindle to a size which would be a fair match for Bakmor’s impatient warriors Huy smiled as he imagined how Bakmor must be chafing at this delay. He had longer to wait, Huy decided, as he watched the first slaves emerge from the green waters and scramble thankfully out onto the island with their black skins shining wetly in the morning sunlight.

Their thankfulness was premature, Huy thought. There was still the north channel of the river between them and safety. They began filing off the island, while behind them the bark ropes bowed downstream with the weight of human bodies and the island itself swarmed with naked black flesh. It was an awesome spectacle, such a multitude strung across the river, and still a dense mass of black men upon the south bank.

If it is Timon, he will know enough to hold his best men in the rearguard. Huy peered at the men waiting to take their turns upon the ropes, and it seemed that they were steadier and better armed than those in the van. He must let their number reduce further before he could risk Bakmor’s tiny force against them.

Huy turned his attention back to the ford, from the island the lines of heads were creeping slowly across towards the far bank. He could see now that he would have a difficult choice to make. If he delayed his attack much longer, then many of the fugitives would escape into the dense forests of the north, beyond the reach of his army for ever. However, if he struck before they escaped it would mean committing Bakmor to battle with vastly superior numbers. The choice was a delicate one, and Huy pondered it carefully. His decision was made when he thought suddenly of the day in the future when he would report to his king.

‘Not one of them escaped, Majesty.’ And he could almost hear the reply, ‘I did not doubt it, my bird of the sun.’

Huy turned to the captain of the galley who stood beside him.

‘Hoist the standard!’ he said quietly, and immediately the order was shouted to the foredeck. The golden battle standard soared to the masthead.

As a hoarse cheer rose from the rowing decks of the galley,

Huy saw the battle signal repeated in the other galley anchored on his starboard beam.

In the bows a sailor swung a battle-axe, severing the anchor cable and the galleys spread their wide wings of oars. They dipped and swung and rose, wet and gleaming golden and silver in the sunlight. Under Huy’s feet the ship dashed forward against the current, so swiftly that he staggered before he caught his balance. The galleys flew in formation, their great wings beating, arrowing upstream on a diverging course that would carry one through each channel of the river.

‘Steer for the centre of their line,’ Huy ordered the galley captain, and the order was shouted to the helm.

They raced down on the crowded ropes, strung like black pearls with the heads of struggling men. Above the rush of water, and the creak and dip of oars, Huy heard a mounting hubbub of terror from the men who looked up at the deadly bows that towered above them.

He moved to the bulwark and looked down. He saw their faces turned up towards him, and their eyes showed white in the dark faces. He crushed down the stirrings of his pity, for these were not men. They were the enemy.

The archers in the bows were loosing their arrows into them now. Huy saw an arrow strike one of them squarely in the face and stand there as the man threw his arms high and was swept away by the current.

The galley cut into the heavily laden ropes, slowing slightly and lurching as the weight of them checked the forward dash, then they snapped and burst asunder beneath the iron-shod bows, and the current swept the lines of men away into deep water, washing them close under the walls of the garrison where Huy’s archers waited to pick them like windfallen fruit.

The galleys drove through the shallows, scraping their keels against the rock bottom of the ford and then they were into the deep water beyond, and Huy ran to the stern and looked back. The river was filled from bank to bank with screaming, drowning men. Some of them clung to the branches of overhanging trees, others to slippery outcrops of rock, or to floating pieces of driftwood and mats of papyrus. The island was completely hidden by a solid blanket of wet and shivering humanity, and still others were trying to find a foothold upon it, floundering and struggling in the shallows.

There were so many of them that they reminded Huy of a migration of insects, rather than human beings. They were like ants, tens of thousands of ants. He held that thought as he steeled himself to give the next order.

The galley captain was watching him expectantly, he could see the sailors in the bows at the tubes. They were looking up at the castle, waiting for the order.

‘Very well, Captain,’ Huy said, remembering that they were ants and not men. Instantly the galley captain was shouting his orders, and the ship swung broadside to the current. The other galley conformed to this manoeuvre and from the bows of both of them the deadly jets of Opet’s secret weapon, ‘Baal’s fire’, were squirted.

It sprayed upon the surface of the river, spreading smoothly, the sunlight broke into rainbows of colour upon the floating liquid, and the stink of it was oily and rank.

Then magically it burst into flame, the entire surface of the river became a solid sheet of roaring orange flame from which banks of sooty black smoke billowed, and the heat of it was so intense that Huy drew back quickly as he felt his beard singe.

‘In Baal’s holy name,’ Huy whispered, as he watched the fire, named for the great god Baal, sweep majestically downstream, filling the great river from bank to bank, filling the sky with dark clouds. It flowed over the crowded island, and when it had passed, the blackened bodies lay in high smouldering heaps, while the driftwood and dried papyrus burned like a funeral pyre.

The wall of fire marched downstream, past the fortress walls, searing the vegetation along each bank, sweeping the river clear of life. In ten short minutes 20,000 souls had perished, and their charred bodies floated down towards the sea or washed up as jetsam along the sand banks and back eddies of the river.

After the flames passed, Timon stood appalled and stared at the devastation. He could not believe the dreadful destructive force he had just witnessed, he could not believe that more than half of his army had vanished so swiftly. He was left with a small portion of his original command.

Those left were his best men, but in truth he knew them to be no match for the cohorts that opposed him. Although he realized that he must make his dispositions for the attack which would now surely follow, yet he wasted a few seconds staring longingly across the river to the north where his own land lay. He was cut off from it now, perhaps for ever.

The galleys lay a hundred paces off the bank, with their bows pointed towards him. They were as menacing as two great reptilian monsters, and now he had seen them in action Timon felt fear’s chilly breath on his neck when he looked at them.

Behind him rose the roar of challenge and counter-challenge and the clash of shields and weapons. Timon swung about. The second attack had come, as he feared. It had come with the precision and timing he had expected. It had come crashing into his rear at the exact moment when his men’s stomachs were cold with the dreadful destruction they had witnessed in the van.

Timon felt his anger swell and buoy him upwards, his hatred rose with it. Anger and hatred, the forces upon which his whole existence depended. Anger that he must fight against men like these with such fragile weapons. Even as he turned to join the conflict he swore an oath that he had sworn a hundred times before. I will build an army from my own people which will match these pale-skinned devils.

Timon fought his way towards the rear through the press of his own men. The attack was driving them back steadily, jamming them against the river, packing them so densely that they could neither manoeuvre nor wield their weapons.

It was a nightmare sensation, attempting to find a way through this swaying, surging sea of black bodies. Desperately Timon bellowed his orders, trying to force them forward, trying to make them deploy outwards, but his voice was lost in the battle roar and even his great strength was helpless in this jam of black humanity.

Over the heads of his men he could see the enemy helmets and plumes ringing them. The sword and axe rose and fell to a solemn rhythm, and before them his men dropped their weapons, turned their backs and tried to burrow their way into the massed bodies of their companions. The pressure increased steadily, smothering the ranks behind and driving them steadily back towards the river.

Over the heads of the attackers the archers and javelin men hurled a rain of missiles into Timon’s centre, and so densely was it packed that the dead men could not fall but were held upright by their neighbours’ striving bodies.

Now the galleys stole in quietly towards the bank and from the high castles the archers loosed their arrows into the van of Timon’s army. The bank began to crumble away beneath the desperate feet, and living and dead slid and fell into the swift waters.

Soon the colour of the water changed from green to brown, and then to the bright scarlet of life blood.

‘A river of blood, Holiness,’ the galley commander remarked in conversational tones. ‘I have heard it sung by the poets before, but this is the first time I have ever seen it.’

Huy nodded without answering. He could see that the battle had reached a point of equilibrium. The pressure that Bakmor’s cohorts, even strengthened with those of Mago, could exert was insufficient to drive the enemy back another yard. Soon that pressure must relax, for already the axemen were tiring. When that happened the slave army would explode outwards, like a released bowstring. It needed but an ounce more pressure to topple the slaves into the river, but that pressure must come within the next few minutes.

Huy muttered impatiently, ‘Come, Bakmor, are you blinded by blood? Has battle-lust drowned your reason? Now is your moment, but it is passing!’ And Huy began to pace the wooden deck anxiously. It was so clear to him what should be done, that it amazed him that others could not see it.

‘Come, Bakmor, come!’ he pleaded, and then he grunted his relief.

‘Not a moment too soon!’

Bakmor had charged his war elephants into the massed remnant of Timon’s army. Trumpeting and squealing, the huge animals waded through living bodies, crushing them under-foot, lifting men in their trunks and flinging them towards the sky. A terrified screeching of despair went up from 10,000 throats, and Timon’s army turned to water.

‘Now!’ shouted Huy, and the galleys shot in towards the bank of the river. They ran aground together, and from them poured 400 heavy axemen, led by Huy Ben-Amon.

His men tried to keep with him. For in the sixth legion the place of honour in battle was at the side of the High Priest. But the vulture axe clave forward so swiftly that it took a good man to pace it.

‘For Baal!’ And they reaped the bloody harvest so the ground beneath their feet turned to red mud, and the river flowed brightly.

In the midst of it Huy saw Timon. The shock of it slowed his arm for a second, and a spear jabbed at him, scoring his ribs. Huy killed the spearman with a casual back-handed stroke, then cut his way through the press towards Timon. It was slow work, and Timon retreated ahead of him towards the river bank.

‘Timon!’ Huy shouted in desperation, and those terrible smoky yellow eyes turned to him and held his gaze. They were the eyes of a leopard in the trap, cruel and merciless.

‘A challenge!’ Huy called. ‘Fight me!’

In reply Timon reared to his full height and hurled his spear at Huy. Huy ducked and the point glanced off his helmet and buried itself in the neck of the man beside Huy. The man cried out and fell.

Timon turned and with three strides he had reached the bank of the river. He leapt out into the red waters, and then struck out powerfully in the over-arm stroke that Huy had taught him.

Huy reached the edge of the bank and tore off his helmet and breastplate, he snapped the leather straps of his greaves and kicked off his sandals.

Naked, except for the belt which held his axe, Huy looked out across the river. Timon was out of range of the archers on the bank, he was halfway across to the island in the time which it had taken Huy to strip.

Huy dived cleanly from the bank, and struck the water flat on his belly. Then he was swimming, dragging himself through the bloody water with those long thick arms and churning the surface white with his powerful legs.

On the island Timon had found weapons The throwing spears of the charred bodies that lay thick upon the ground.

As Huy found his footing and waded ashore, Timon hurled the first of them. Huy deflected the spear with a swing of his axe, catching the spear-blade full on the great butterfly-shaped head, swatting the spear out of the air as though it were an insect.

Again Timon threw, and again - but now Huy was charging him across the rocky, corpse-strewn ground, and each thrown spear was caught neatly upon the head of the axe and sent spinning aside to fall harmlessly on the rocky earth.

In desperation Timon stooped and picked up one at the round river boulders as large as a man’s head. He lifted it over his head with both hands, and stepped forward as he threw it. The rock caught Huy a glancing blow on his shoulder, and knocked him down on his back with the axe skidding away from his hand.

Timon charged at him, careless in his anger and hatred. Huy bounced off the earth, flipping himself forward like a thrown javelin.

The top of Huy’s head crashed into Timon’s body just below the rib-cage and the air of his lungs rushed out of his throat in a gasp of agony. Timon doubled up and dropped to his knees, clutching at his chest with both hands.

Huy stood over him, and bunched his hand in the manner of the gladiators. He struck Timon with the bony hammer of his fist just below the ear, and Timon toppled forward senseless to the rocks.

‘I cannot kill you, Timon,’ Huy’s voice came to him through grey mist, and from a great distance. ‘Though you deserve death as no one else has done before you. You have betrayed my trust. You have carried the sword against me and my king - you deserve to die.’

Huy’s face came into focus, and Timon found himself tying on his back with arms outstretched. He tried to move and found himself bound. Leather thongs were knotted tightly about his fingers and pegged down to the earth, holding him captive. He rolled his head and found himself on the north side of the island, hidden from watchers on the south bank and alone with Huy.

On the rocks beside him a small fire of driftwood burned. Huy had lit it from a smouldering remnant, and in it was heating a broad spear-head with its shaft snapped off short.

‘There is little time. Soon my men will come to find me, and then it will be out of my hands,’ Huy explained reasonably. ‘I have made an oath to my gods, so I cannot give you the punishment which you have earned. Yet I have a duty to my king and my people. I cannot let you carry the sword against us again.

‘The Romans had an answer for this, and though I hate all things of Rome, I must use their methods now.’

Huy stood up, and leaned over Timon.

‘I made a mistake with you. No man can ever tame the wild leopard.’ Huy held the vulture axe in his right hand. ‘You were never Timon, you were always Manatassi. You are as different from me as the colour of my skin is different from yours. There was never a bond between us, it was illusion, for though our mouths speak the same language, our ears hear the sounds differently.

‘Your destiny is to seek the destruction of all that I hold dear, all that my people have built and tended. My destiny is to protect it, with my very life’s blood.’ Huy paused, and there was true regret in his heart as he went on. ‘I cannot kill you, but I must make sure that you never carry the sword again.’

The vulture axe sang, and Timon screamed once, and then whimpered softly as his severed right hand twitched and trembled like a dying animal on the scorched earth of the island.

Huy fetched the heated spear blade from the fire and sealed off the pumping blood vessels of the stump in a hissing puff of stinking smoke. Then he cut the thongs that still bound Timon.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘You must trust yourself to the river now. My men will come to search the island soon.’

Timon dragged himself down the beach, and at the water’s edge be looked back at Huy. His huge black body was scarred and ravaged, and his eyes were terrible.

Slowly he lowered himself into the water, holding the raw stump of his arm across his chest. The current took him, and his head dwindled to a speck upon the wide river, until it was swept beyond the bend below the fort. Huy watched it out of sight, then he stooped and picked up the severed hand from the ground and dropped it onto the fire and piled dry driftwood upon it.

Bakmor had dug his cremation pits along the bank of the river, and he and Huy passed along the ranks of fallen warriors laid upon their last couch of wood. It was the ceremony of farewell, and Huy paused and looked down at old Mago. In death the garrison commander had a dignity which he had lacked in life.

‘How sweet is the taste of glory now, Mago?’ Huy asked him softly, and it seemed that Mago smiled in his sleep.

Huy sang the praise of Baal, and then he lit the funeral fires with his own hand.

Tanith was not upon the walls to welcome him when they marched back to the fortress of Sett, but Huy found her in her own chamber. She had been weeping and her face was pale, with dark blue smears beneath her eyes.

‘I feared for you, my lord. My heart burned within me, but I did not weep. I was very brave through it all. Through all the horror of it. It was only when they told me that you were safe that I cried. Isn’t that silly?’

Holding her close, Huy asked, ‘Was it like the poets sang it? Was it glorious and heroic?’

‘It was horrible,’ Tanith whispered. ‘Horrible beyond my dreams of horror. It was ugly, my lord, ugly enough to make me despair of beauty.’ She was silent then, remembering it all again. ‘You poets never tell of the blood, and the wounded screaming and - all the other things.’

‘No,’ Huy agreed. ‘We never do.’

In the night Huy woke and found that Tanith was sitting beside him on the couch. The night lamp was trimmed low and her eyes were dark pools in her face.

‘What troubles you?’ Huy asked, and she was quiet a few seconds before she spoke.

‘Holy Father, you are so gentle, so kind. How could you do what was done today?’

Huy pondered the reply a moment.

It was my duty,‘ he explained at last.

‘Your duty to slaughter those wretches?’ Tanith asked incredulously.

‘The law is death to rebel slaves.’

‘The law is wrong then,’ Tanith declared hotly.

‘No.’ Huy shook his head. ‘The law is never wrong.’

‘It is!’ Tanith was close to tears again. ‘It is!’

‘The law is all we have that saves us from the void, Tanith. Obey the laws and the gods and you need never fear.’

‘The laws should be changed.’

‘Ah!’ Huy smiled. ‘Change them, by all means, but until they are changed, obey them.’

In the dawn of the next morning Lannon Hycanus arrived at Sett. He arrived at the head of two full legions in battle array, and fifty elephants of war.

‘I fear I have been greedy, sire,’ Huy told him at the gates. I left you not a single one.‘ And Lannon shouted with laughter and embraced Huy, turning to his staff with an arm still about Huy’s shoulders.

‘Which of you was it said that Ben-Amon would not fight?’

That night while he was still sober Huy sang the ballad he had composed to commemorate the Battle of the River of Blood, and Lannon wept at the telling of it, and when it was done he cried out to his own staff.

‘Three against 30,000 - it will always be our shame that we did not fight with Huy Ben-Amon that day at Sett.’

Lannon stood. ‘I give you the new Commander-in-Chief of all the legions of Opet. I give you Huy Ben-Amon, Axeman of the Gods.’

Then king and priest got very drunk together.

Gondweni was one of the 200 tributary chiefs of the Vendi, and his territory bounded on the broken land of the Kal Gorge, the land of the outcasts. He was fat and prosperous, and because he was a prudent man he regularly left small gifts of salt and meat at a place in the hills where the outcasts came for it. Also because he was a prudent man he gave food and shelter to solitary travellers journeying to the hills or returning from them, and when they left his town the memory of their passing went with them.

Thus a tall gaunt stranger sat one night at his hearth and ate his food and drank his beer. Gondweni sensed power and purpose behind the impassive scarred visage with the fierce yellow eyes. He felt an unusual affinity for this man and he talked more freely than was his wont. Although he spoke the language of Vendi, the traveller seemed to know nothing of the politics and affairs of the tribe, not even the name of the paramount king who had succeeded Manatassi when he was carried off by the white devils from across the river.

‘Of Manatassi’s six brothers, five died swiftly and mysteriously after drinking of a special brewing of beer, prepared by the middle brother, Khani. Khani alone survived the feast.’ And Gondweni chuckled and nodded and winked knowingly at the stranger.

‘He is now our king, the Great Black Bull, the collector of the tribute, the Thunder of Heaven, the fat lecher of Vendi with his 500 wives and his fifty young boys.’ Gondweni spat forcefully into the fire, and then drank from the beer pot before passing it to the stranger. When he took it Gondweni saw that the stranger’s right hand was missing and he steadied the pot with the stump.

‘What of Manatassi’s councillors, his war captains, his blood brothers?’ the stranger asked. ‘Where are they now?’

‘Most of them are in the bellies of the birds.’ And Gondweni drew a forefinger across his throat expressively.

‘Most of them?’

‘Some went over to Khani and ate his salt - others spread their wings and flew.’ Gondweni pointed out into the hills which showed like the black teeth of an ancient shark against the moon sky. ‘Some are my neighbours, chiefs of the out-casts, paying tribute to none, and waiting in the hills for they know not what.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Zingala.’

‘Zingala, the ironsmith?’ the stranger demanded eagerly, and Gondweni’s expression changed. He turned on the stranger a hard stare.

‘It seems to me you know more than is safe,’ he said softly. ‘Perhaps we should sleep now.’ He stood up and pointed out a hut. ‘There is a sleeping mat laid out for you, and I will send a young girl for your comfort.’

The stranger’s need was like a raging storm on the girl’s unresisting body, battering and driving, and Gondweni heard her crying out in pain and fear. He lay awake, troubled and restless, but in the dawn when he went to the stranger’s hut the girl lay crumpled in exhausted sleep and the man was gone.

A deep gorge split the mountains, so deep that the path was dark and moss-covered and slippery underfoot. At the head of the gorge a fall of silver spray plunged down from the cliffs above, and the wind drove it in a fine cold mist into Manatassi’s face as he climbed upwards.

At a level place he paused to rest, and the stump of his right arm ached cruelly in the cold. He ignored the pain, pushing it below the surface of his conscious mind, and he looked up the deep dark gut of the gorge.

High above him on the cliff top, outlined against the pale blue of the noon sky was the foreshortened figure of a man. The figure stood very still, and the stillness was in itself menacing.

Manatassi ate a little cold millet cake, and drank from the stream of icy clear water, before beginning the climb again. Now there were other figures. They appeared silently and unexpectedly at steep or easily defended places on the trail and they watched him.

One of them stood atop a giant boulder, fully forty feet high, which all but blocked the gorge. He was a tall man, well muscled and heavily armed. Manatassi recognized him, the man had been a captain of one of his old regiments.

Manatassi stopped below the boulder, and let the cloak fall back from his head, exposing his face, but the man did not recognize him, could not see his king in this ravaged face from which pain and hatred had stripped the flesh and which the whip and the club had remoulded.

‘Am I so altered?’ Manatassi thought grimly. ‘Will no man recognize me again?

He and the man stared at each other for many seconds until Manatassi spoke.

‘I seek Zingala. the ironsmith.’

He knew that even though Zingala had joined the outcasts, such a famous craftsman must still have many clients seek him out. He knew that alone and unarmed he would be allowed to pass on such business.

The sentry upon the boulder turned his head slightly and pointed with his chin up the gorge, and Manatassi went on.

There were narrow steps that climbed the black rock cliff beside the waterfall, and when Manatassi came out upon the summit there were armed and silent men waiting. They fell in behind and on each side of him as he strode out along the only path, through the thick forest which covered the crest of the mountain.

The smoke of the furnaces guided Manatassi, and he came at last to a natural amphitheatre of rock, a bowl one hundred paces across, where Zingala worked his art with iron.

The old master was at one of his furnaces, packing the ore into the belly of it, each lump carefully hand selected. His apprentices were gathered around respectfully, ready to add the layers of limestone and charcoal upon the ore.

Zingala straightened up from his task and held aching back muscles as he watched the tall stranger and his escort come down into the bowl. There was something familiar in the man’s walk, in the way he carried his shoulders, the tilt of his head, and Zingala frowned. He dropped his hands to his sides, and shuffled uncertainly as the man’s features touched a deep memory. The stranger stopped before him and stared into Zingala’s face - those eyes, yellow and fierce and compelling.

Quickly he looked down at the stranger’s feet and he saw the deep cleft between the toes. Zingala wailed and dropped onto his face upon the earth. He took one of Manatassi’s deformed feet and placed it upon his own grey-frosted pate.

‘Command me,’ he cried. ‘Command me, Manatassi, the great black beast, the Thunder of the Heavens.’

The others heard the name and they fell as though lightning had struck them down.

‘Command us,’ they cried. ‘Command us, black bull of a thousand cows.’

Manatassi looked upon his band of outlaws as they grovelled about him, and he spoke softly but in a voice that cut to the heart of each of them.

‘There is but one command I give you, and that is – OBEY!’

The furnace was shaped like the belly of a pregnant woman, and the entrance was slitted like her pudenda between spread thighs of moulded clay.

To fertilize the smelting of ore, Zingala introduced the buck-horn nozzle of the bellows into the opening. The nozzle was shaped like a priapus, and the work was done in a strictly ritualistic sequence while the apprentices sang the birth chant, and Zingala sweated and laboured like a midwife in his leather apron, pumping away at the leather bellows.

When at last the plug of clay was drawn and the molten metal ran in a fiery stream into the sand moulds there was a murmur of relief and congratulation from the watchers.

Using an anvil of ironstone and a set of special hammers Zingala forged the lion’s paw with its five massive iron claws and its pad of solid metal. He filed and dressed and polished it, then he reheated it and tempered it in the blood of a leopard and the fat of a hippopotamus.

One of the skilled leather-workers built a socket of green elephant hide and shaped it to fit the stump of Manatassi’s right arm. The iron claw was fixed securely into the leather socket and when it was strapped to Manatassi’s stump it made a fearsome artificial limb.

Khani, the paramount ruler of Vendi and foppish half-brother of Manatassi, was with his woman when the iron claw tore the top off his skull. The girl beneath him screamed and fainted with the shock of it.

Sondala, the king of Buthelezi, had many subjects, a multitude of cattle, a little grazing-land and even less water to carry his people and his kine through a season of drought.

He was a small wiry man, with quick nervous eyes and a ready smile. Of all the tribes along the great river his was the latest to come out of the north, and he was crushed between the powerful Vendi tribe on the one hand and those white-robed, long-bearded brown-skinned Dravs on the other. He was a desperate man, ready to listen with both ears to any proposition.

He sat in the firelight and grinned and darted quick eyes at the gaunt godlike figure across the hut from him - this king with the ruined face, and bird’s feet and clawed hand of iron.

‘You have twelve regiments, each of 2,000 men,’ Manatassi told him. ‘You have five flowerings of maidens each of 5,000. You have, at the latest count, 127,000 cattle, bulls, cows, calves and oxen.’

Sondala grinned and wriggled uneasily, amazed at the accuracy of the Vendi king’s intelligence.

‘Where will you find food and grass and drink for such a multitude?’ Manatassi asked, and Sondala smiled and listened.

‘I will give you grazing, and land. I will give you a land rich with fruit and lush with grass, a land over which your people will march for ten generations without finding the limits of it.’

‘What do you want of me?’ Sondala whispered at last, still grinning and blinking his eyes quickly.

‘I want your regiments to command. I want your spear in my hand. I want your shield to march beside me.’

‘If I refuse?’ Sondala asked.

‘Then I will kill you,’ said Manatassi. ‘And take your regiments, and all five flowerings of your maidens, and all your 127,000 cattle, except for ten which I will sacrifice upon your grave as a mark of respect to your ghost.’ Manatassi grinned then also, and it was such a terrible baring of teeth in that battered face that Sondala’s own smile froze.

‘I am your dog,’ he said hoarsely, and he knelt before Manatassi. ‘Command me.’

‘There is but one command,’ said Manatassi softly. ‘And that command is, OBEY!’

In the first year Manatassi made treaties with the Vingo, the Satassa and the Bey. He fought the Xhota in a single devastating battle, employing tactics so revolutionary and relentless that the Xhota king and his wives and courtiers and princes were taken twenty minutes after battle was joined. Instead of massacring the menfolk, and taking the women and cattle as was the custom, Manatassi had only the king and royal family strangled, then he assembled the defeated regiments, still intact and under their own commanders, and he made them swear their allegiance to him. They thundered it in massed voice that seemed to shake the leaves in the trees and rock the hills upon their foundations.

In the second year, after the rains had passed, Manatassi marched westwards as far as that desert coast on which a cold green surf raged eternally. He fought four great battles, strangled four kings - treated with two others, and added almost a hundred thousand warriors to his regiments.

Those close to the great black beast knew that he seldom slept. It seemed there was some driving force within him that denied him rest or pleasure. He ate food without tasting it, in the perfunctory manner in which a man might throw a log upon the fire merely to keep it burning. He never laughed, and smiled only when a task was performed to his satisfaction. He used women with a swift brutality that left them trembling and weeping, and he shared companionship with no man.

Only once did his lieutenants see him show the emotions of a man. They stood upon the tall yellow dunes at the western limit of the land. Manatassi was apart from them draped in the leopard-skin of royalty and with the blue heron feathers of his head-dress fluttering in the cold breeze that came off the sea.

Suddenly one of the war captains exclaimed aloud and pointed out across the green waters. From out of the banks of silver sea fret, looming like a ghost ship through the mist, sped one of the galleys of Opet. With her single square sail bellied by the trade winds, and her banks of oars beating rhythmically, she sped in silence towards the north on her long voyage of trade to Cadiz.

Again a captain exclaimed, and they all looked towards the king. His face shone and dripped with sweat, and his jaws clenched and ground his teeth together with a sound like rock on rock. His eyes were burning mad as he watched the passage of the galley, and his body shook and shuddered with the strength of his hatred.

The captain ran to aid him, thinking him stricken with sudden fever. He touched the king’s arm.

‘High-born,’ he started, and Manatassi turned upon him in raging madness and struck him down with the iron claw, ripping half his face away.

‘There,’ he screamed, pointing with the claw at the disappearing galley. ‘There is your enemy. Mark him well.’

Each day brought its own excitements, its secret delights and ventures - and its happiness. It did not seem five years since she and Huy had become lovers, so swiftly had the years sped. Yet it was so, for the Festival of the Fruitful Earth was almost come around once more.

Tanith laughed aloud at the memory of her seduction of Huy, and she made her plans to repeat the performance during the coming Festival. Beside her Aina mumbled a question, peering at her quizzically from the depths of her hood.

‘Why do you laugh, child?’

‘I laugh because I am happy, old mother.’

‘Oh, to be young once again. You do not know what it is like to grow old.’ Aina began one of her monologues, and Tanith led her through the bustle of the harbour area, past the low taverns and the taunting street girls to where steps were cut into the stone jetty. She danced down the steps and leapt lightly to the deck of the small sailing craft moored to one of the iron rings in the jetty.

Coming out of the tiny cabin, dressed in rough fisherman’s clothes and with a scarf tied about his head. Huy was too late to help her aboard.

‘You are late.’

‘For your impertinence I shall punish you, just as soon as it is safe,’ Tanith warned him.

‘I look forward to it,’ Huy grinned, and helped old Aina over the gunwale, while Tanith ran forward to cast off the head lines.

Huy was perched in the stern with the steering oar tucked under his arm, and Tanith sitting as close beside him as she could without touching. She had thrown off her cloak, and wore now a light cotton tunic edged with gold thread and belted with a solid gold chain, a name-day gift from Huy.

Her hair billowed out behind her like black smoke, and her cheeks were flushed. Huy kept glancing at her, and each time she looked at him and laughed for no reason.

The wind was fine on their beam, and as they ran close-hauled for the islands the wind whipped droplets from the bow wave into their faces, and the water was cold in the warmth of the sun. Huy ran the vessel neatly through an almost invisible channel in the reeds, and they emerged into a quiet and sheltered lagoon whose surface was covered with the dark green pads of the water lilies and starred with the blue and gold of their blossoms. Water fowl paddled and dabbled and flighted over and upon the quiet waters.

They were out of the wind here and Huy took up a long pole from the deck and, standing in the stern, he poled them across the lagoon to the beach of dazzling white sand. Jumping out into knee-deep water he hauled the vessel up onto the beach.

Amongst the polished black boulders above the beach Huy rigged a sun shelter with a strip of sail, and he helped Aina across the sand and installed her beneath the shelter.

‘A bowl of wine, old mother,’ he suggested solicitously.

‘You are too kind. Holiness.’

They left her there, snoring quietly in the shade, and they walked hand in hand along the ribbon of beach, beyond the curve of the bay. Under the ivory palms Huy spread a cloak on the firm clean sand, and they rid themselves of their clothing and lay together talking and laughing and making love.

Then they bathed together in the clear warm lake water, and, as they lay in the shallows with the wavelets flopping lazily over them, shoals of silvery finger-long fish came to nibble at their naked skin. Tanith laughed and kicked at the tickle of their toothless mouths.

They went to lie in the sun and dry themselves, and Huy looked up at Tanith standing over him. Her hair was sodden and dangled in heavy black ropes down her back and breasts. The sun had brought a glow to her shoulders, and there were water drops clinging in her eyelashes. She stood proudly under his scrutiny, and she cupped her breasts, one in each hand.

‘Do you see ought different about me, Holy Father?’ She asked in her teasing voice, so that Huy smiled and shook his head.

‘Look closer,’ she invited him, and it seemed then that her breasts were fatter and more pointed, he noticed also that they were marbled with bluish veins beneath the white skin.

‘Yes?’ Tanith asked, and ran her hands down her body to cradle her belly.

‘And here?’ she asked. ‘Anything different here?’ And she puffed out her stomach, laughing at him.

‘You are getting fat,’ Huy reprimanded her, giving her back her laughter. ‘You eat too much.’

Tanith shook her head. ‘What I have in here, Holy Father, certainly never went in through my mouth.’

Slowly the laughter dried up in the back of Huy’s throat, and he gawked at her.

Huy lay in the darkness and he was still stunned and bemused. It still seemed impossible that some of the seed which he had sown so carelessly should have taken root; were not the priestesses of Astarte instructed in the secret ways of preventing just such an occurrence? This was really an event to rank with earthquake and storm and defeat in battle. Something would have to be done about it, something radical.

Lightly Huy’s mind touched upon the thought of the grisly old hags who lived along the harbour front, whose job it was to rectify such blunders. Instantly he rejected the idea.

‘No.’ He spoke aloud, and then listened to the sound of Tanith’s breathing, hoping he had not woken her. He began to moderate his plans, perhaps it was not necessary for such radical action, perhaps he could arrange for another shrine to be consecrated in a remote area of the kingdom, and there, away from prying eyes and busy tongues, she could bear his son. It would be simple enough to find a foster mother, someone he could trust. There were many of the veterans of his legion, men maimed in battle, now living the simple life on one of Huy’s estates. Men who would lie and steal and cheat and die for him. Men with fruitful wives, whose breasts were fat and full enough to feed another little lodger.

There they could go as often as the opportunity arose to be with their son. He could imagine it already, the happiness and the laughter, and his son kicking and gurgling, fat-bellied in the sunlight.

Stealthily Huy reached beneath the bed covers, lightly his hand settled on Tanith’s naked belly and he began to explore it.

‘You cannot feel anything yet,’ Tanith whispered, ‘I didn’t do the things the priestesses taught me. That was very wicked of me, wasn’t it? Are you angry with me, my lord?’

‘No,’ said Huy. ‘I am very pleased with you.’

‘I thought you would be,’ chuckled Tanith contentedly, and snuggled against him, and then she added drowsily, ‘I mean, once you got used to the idea.’

The knocking and shouting woke them both and Huy bounded from the couch and snatched up the vulture axe before he was properly awake. Once the initial confusion had quieted, and the house slaves had satisfied themselves by shouted challenge and loud reply that the midnight callers were a contingent of the royal guard, Huy put aside the axe and lit another lamp.

‘Holy Father.’ One of the body slaves pounded on the door of the bedchamber.

‘What is it?’

‘The king’s guard. The Cry-Lion cannot sleep. He bids you take your lute and attend him.’

Huy sat on the edge of the couch and cursed softly but meaningfully, running his fingers through his beard and curls, trying to knuckle the sleep from his eyes.

‘Did you hear me, Holiness?’

‘I heard you.’ growled Huy.

“The Gry-Lion said that they were to accept no excuse, and to wait while you dressed, and to escort you to the palace.‘

Huy stood up and reached for his tunic, but held his hand as he saw Tanith watching him. Her eyes were enormous in the lamp light, and with her hair in cloudy disorder she looked like a child. Huy lifted the bed clothes and slipped in beside her.

‘Tell the king that my picking finger is sore, my throat is raw, my lute strings are broken - and I am drunk,’ he shouted, and took Tanith in his arms.

Sheikh Hassan rinsed his fingers in the silver bowl and dried them on a square of silk.

‘He seeks to impress us with his show of strength,’ Omar, his younger brother, murmured. Hassan glanced at him. His brother was a famous dandy. His beard was washed and perfumed and combed until it glistened, his robes were of the finest silk and his slippers and vest were heavy with embroidery of silk and gold thread. On his finger he wore a pigeon’s-blood ruby the size of the top joint of a man’s thumb. He was misty-eyed from the bhang pipe beside him on the cushions. A dandy perhaps, and a pederast certainly, but nevertheless the possessor of a fine mind and an intuitive perception upon which Hassan relied heavily.

They sat together beneath the ancient fig tree with its widespread branches and its deep dark shade. The dhow that had brought them to this meeting was beached on the white sand of the island below them, and from their vantage point they could look across the channels and sandbanks and slow pools of the great river to the north bank.

There were troops of sea-cow lying on the sandbanks half submerged in the shallows. Huge grey shapes, like river boulders upon which the white egrets perched unconcernedly.

On the north bank a thin ribbon of dark green vegetation grew along the river, but gave way immediately to the bare brown hills beyond. The country here had a blasted and desolate look to it. The hills were bleak and barren with rounded crests. The earth showed through the sparse dry grass, and the dead trees writhed and held their naked branches to the sky, trees drought-stricken and long dead.

However, as the sheikhs watched so the scene changed. Over the hills spread a dark shadow as though a storm cloud had blotted out the sun.

‘Yes,’ said Omar. ‘This show is to open our ears to his words.’

Hassan spat a stream of bright red juice into the dust, and wiped his beard with silk as he watched the bare hills come to life, watched the dark shadow spread. He had never before seen such a vast concourse of humanity. The regiments and squadrons moved into orderly ranks until they covered the hills. Hassan was nervous, but his face was calm, his eyes grave and only the long brown fingers that fidgeted on the jewelled hilt of his dagger betrayed his disquiet. He had not expected anything like this. He had come to this place expecting to discuss trade and mutual boundaries with the new black emperor who had emerged out of that mysterious and little-known land beyond the river. Instead he had found himself confronted with one of the largest armies the world had ever seen assembled. He wondered if Alexander himself had ever commanded such a multitude.

Omar drew on his bhang pipe, held the smoke and then let it trickle thinly from his nostrils.

‘He seeks to impress us,’ he repeated, and Hassan’s reply was brusque.

‘If that is his intention, then he succeeds. I am impressed.’

Still the regiments came pouring over the skyline in thick but orderly columns. They wheeled and fell into the pattern of the whole as though a single mind directed them, the way shoals of fish or flights of migrating birds react to unspoken commands. Indeed, this seemed to be not a gathering of individuals but a single organism, sprawling but well coordinated. Hassan watched it and shivered in the noon heat of the valley.

Upon the north bank all movement ceased, and a massive stillness settled over the serried ranks of black warriors. The stillness seemed more menacing than the preceding movement, and an expectant hush filled the valley, a sense of mounting tension which became unbearable, until Hassan swore and made a gesture as though to rise.

‘I will not pander to the whims of a savage. This is an insult. We will go. He must come to us if he wishes to talk.’ But the gesture never matured, and he sank back upon the cushions and fretted in silence until his brother spoke.

‘It seems,’ said Omar, ‘that the world we know has changed, brother. What was true yesterday, is true no longer.’

‘What is your advice?’

‘Let us find the new truths, and examine them. It is possible that we shall still find something to our advantage in all of this.’

On the hills opposite them there was a disturbance, a stirring of the ranks, the way the tops of tall reeds move when a lion passes through. The sheikhs strained their eyes, calling out to their guards for advice of what was happening, but any reply was lost in an ocean of sound. The earth shook beneath the stamp of hundreds of thousands of feet, the air quivered with the drumming of spears on shields, and from the densely packed hills a single voice from the throats of that black multitude roared the royal salute to a king.

The storm of sound rolled across the valley, and died in echoes against the sky and the southern hills. Again the stillness and silence, then a large war canoe with fifty rowers a side was launched from the sandbank and shot across the green waters towards the island.

A man stepped out onto the white beach, and walked alone up the bank to where the sheikhs waited beneath the fig tree. The very fact that he came without an escort was a mark of contempt, a sign of his strength and invulnerability.

He wore a cloak of leopard skin and sandals upon his feet but he carried no ornament nor weapon. He stood tall and gaunt over the sheikhs, and they seemed to shrink in significance beside his bulk.

He looked at them with the fierce yellow eyes of a bird of prey, eyes that seemed to rake their souls.

‘I am Manatassi,’ he said in a soft deep rumble. ‘I am the Black Beast.’ They had known enough not to be surprised that he spoke their language fluently.

‘I am Hassan, Sheikh of Sofala, Prince of Monomatapa and Viceroy of the Chan Emperor.’

‘You love the yellow metal,’ Manatassi said it like an accusation and Hassan was taken off balance. He blinked and glanced at Omar.

‘Yes,’ said Omar. ‘We love it.’

‘I will give you enough to glut you,’ said Manatassi.

Omar licked his lips, an unconscious expression of greed, and he smiled.

‘You must have much of the precious stuff?’ Hassan asked, this direct approach to trade was distasteful. This man was a savage, he did not understand the niceties of diplomacy. Yet gold was worth a little gaucherie, especially in the quantities this self-styled black beast hinted at. ‘Where does it come from?’

‘From the treasure house of Lannon Hycanus, Gry-Lion of Opet and king of the four kingdoms,’ said Manatassi, and Hassan frowned quickly,

‘I do not understand you.’

Then you are stupid,‘ said Manatassi, and Hassan flushed dusky rose beneath his brown skin and a retort rose swiftly to his lips, but he felt his brother’s cautionary fingers press his wrist.

‘Explain it to me,’ said Omar. ‘Do you intend to war with Opet?’

‘I will destroy them - destroy their people, their cities and their gods. I will leave not a trace of them, not a single living one.’ The giant Negro began to tremble, a little white spittle wet his full purple lips and a light sheen of sweat greased his battered features.

Omar smiled delicately. ‘We heard of a battle at a place named Sett.’

Manatassi roared, a sound of pain. He leaped towards the sheikh and from under his cloak he drew the clawed iron hand and held it in Omar’s face. Omar scrambled backwards, and clung to his brother.

‘Do not mock me, little brown man, do not mock me, or I will tear out your liver.’

Omar moaned with terror and sweat ran down into his beard.

‘Peace,’ Hassan intervened hurriedly. ‘My brother meant only to remark that the legions of Opet will be difficult to destroy.’

Manatassi gulped for air, still shaking with his rage. He turned away and walked to the edge of the island and stared down into the water. His shoulders heaved, and his chest panted for air, but slowly he calmed himself and came back to them.

‘Do you see them?’ He pointed to his army that still darkened the hills.

‘Numbers alone - will they be sufficient?’ Hassan asked. ‘You challenge a mighty foe.’

‘I will show you,’ said Manatassi, and he lifted the iron claw. Instantly one of his war captains ran from the canoe and knelt before him.

Manatassi spoke a few words in the Vendi language and pointed out at the river. The captain sprang to his feet with an expression of joy lighting his dark face. He saluted, went bounding away down the bank, leapt into the bows of the canoe and was sped swiftly across to the north bank.

The sheikhs watched with puzzled interest as a new movement began amongst the massed warriors on the far bank. They moved forward in two thick columns, swarming into the water, and Hassan exclaimed mildly, ‘They carry no weapons.’

‘They are naked,’ added Omar, and his terror ebbed and was replaced by an erotic interest as he watched the black columns move out into the shallows. Like the horns of a buffalo they circled one of the sandbanks, and though the chest-deep water hampered them, yet the manoeuvre was completed before the old bull hippopotamus woke from his gargantuan slumber to find himself surrounded.

He lumbered to his feet and glared about him with his piggy pink eyes. Five tons of solid flesh, clad in a thick grey hide, splotched with pink upon the belly. His legs were short and thick and powerful, and when he opened his jaws to bellow he exposed great yellow fangs of ivory which could bite a war canoe in half.

He broke into a cumbersome gallop, leaving deep hoof prints in the soft white sandbank, and he charged at the wall of black bodies that cut him off from the deep pool of the river. He entered the shallows, churning up a wake of foaming white water, while ahead of him the wall of black men solidified and thickened as the line bunched up to receive and absorb his charge.

The bull went into them at full gallop, and human bodies were flung about like chaff in a whirlwind. His jaws clashed as he chopped at them, and when he drove forward it seemed that nothing could stay such devastating power. He must burst through them and find safety in the deeps of the river. Yet they swarmed about him, from the sides and rear, and his charge slowed perceptively, although his bellows seemed louder and the champing of ivory tusks cutting through living flesh carried clearly to the watchers on the island.

Manatassi stood quietly, leaning forward slightly, with a small frown upon his scar-riven brow, and his eyes were yellow and watchful.

In the river the water creamed and flashed and sparkled. The bull’s bellows took on a new note, a hint of panic, and he was no longer visible beneath the swarming naked bodies. It was like a scorpion attacked by army ants, creatures only a small fraction of his size smothering him with their numbers. The sunlight glittered on the wet bodies, and the bull’s forward progress was arrested. He was transformed into a struggling ball of human bodies, while around him the water turned dark brown with blood, and the mauled bodies fell away like poisoned black ticks from the body of an ox. They floated down on the sluggish current, while others swarmed forward eagerly to replace them.

Now, miraculously, the striving knot of men and beast began to move towards the island; leaving the debris of death behind them, they moved slowly through the shallows.

They reached the island, and came from the water - 1,000, perhaps 2,000 men, carrying the exhausted but still struggling hippopotamus bodily from the river and up the bank. The bull slashed viciously from side to side, and all within reach of his jaws died, while the bull’s head and the inside of his mouth were clotted with the bright blood of his victims.

Leaving a thick trail of dead and terribly maimed men behind them, they carried the bull to where Manatassi stood waiting. The war captain came forward unsteadily. He was weak from loss of blood for he had lost one arm above the elbow, taken away by a single bite of those terrible jaws.

He handed a stabbing spear to his king. Manatassi walked forward, and while his men held down the terrified monster, he stabbed it in the throat. Finding the jugular vein with the first thrust, the bull died in a burst of dark blood and a cry that rang against the hills.

Manatassi stepped back and watched impassively as his men dispatched their wounded with swift mercy, and when the war captain came and knelt before him clutching the severed stump of an arm to his chest and begged for the honour at the hand of his king, a bright pride burned briefly in Manatassi’s eyes. He made the mercy stroke, crushing the man’s skull with a single blow of the iron claw, then he walked back, and smiled bleakly as he saw the sheikh’s amazement.

‘That is my answer,’ he said, and after a while Hassan asked, ‘What do you want of us?’

‘Two things,’ Manatassi replied. ‘An undefended passage of the river through your territory for my armies. You must forsake your pact of mutual defence with Opet - and I want iron weapons. My smiths will take another ten years to arm so many men. I want weapons from you.’

‘In return you will deliver to us the gold of Opet. and the mines of the middle kingdom?’

‘No!’ Manatassi snarled angrily. ‘You may take the gold. I have no use for it. It is a cursed metal, soft and useless. You may take all that Opet has, but,’ and he paused, ‘the mines of the middle kingdom will never be worked again. No more will men go down to die unnaturally in the earth.’

Hassan wanted to protest. Without the gold of the middle kingdom his own reason for existing would vanish. He could imagine the rage of the Chan Emperor denied his trade routes with the land of gold. Omar’s fingers warned him gently, their soft insinuating touch speaking clearly.

‘There will be another time to argue.’ And Hassan heeded the warning, he choked back the protest and instead he smiled at Manatassi.

‘You will have your weapons. I will see to it.’

‘When?’ demanded Manatassi.

‘Soon,’ promised Hassan, ‘as soon as my ships can return from the land across the eastern seas.’

Lannon had aged these last few years, Huy thought. Yet the change was flattering, the new lines that care had chiselled dispelled the prettiness from his features and had given him dignity. Around the mouth there was the same petulance, the pout of the spoiled child, but one had to look closely to find it.

His body was as young and hard as it ever had been, however, and as he stood now, stark naked in the bows, in the attitude of the harpooner, every muscle in his back and shoulders stood out clearly beneath the oiled skin. The sun had gilded his body to a dark honey gold and only his buttocks were a creamed ivory where his breech clout had protected them. He was a beautiful creature, favoured beyond all others by the gods, and Huy compared this body to his own and felt a despair within him.

Words began to form in his mind, a song to Lannon, an ode to his beauty. As he poled the skiff silently and smoothly over the still waters of the lake the words tumbled about in his mind, like wind-blown leaves, then they began to fall into patterns and the song was born.

In the bows Lannon signalled with his free hand without looking around, still poised, staring down into the waters and Huy turned the skiff with an expert thrust of the pole. Suddenly Lannon’s body unleashed its pent-up energy in a fluid explosive thrust, an uncoiling of tensed muscles as he hurled the long harpoon down through the surface. The water bulged and swirled, and the line coiled in the bottom of the skiff began tearing out over the side, hissing away into the water.

‘Ha!’ shouted Lannon. ‘A fair thrust! Help me, Huy!’ And together they jumped to the line, laughing with excitement and then swearing at the pain of scorched fingers as the line ran through them. Together they slowed the heavy run of the fish. The skiff was moving out into the lake as the fish sought the deep water, dragging them with it.

‘In Baal’s holy name, stop him, Huy,’ Lannon panted. ‘Don’t let him get out there and sound on us, we’ll lose him for a certainty. And they threw their combined weight on the line. The muscles in Huy’s arms and shoulders bunched and corded like a sack of pythons, and the fish turned.

They brought him up swirling and kicking in circles under the skiff and when his huge whiskered head broke the surface Lannon shouted, ‘Hold him!’ And Huy took a turn of the line about his wrist and braced his body against the weight, the skiff heeling dangerously as Lannon snatched up the killing club and aimed a blow at the glistening black head.

The surface exploded as the fish went into its death-throes, and water cascaded over them drenching them both.

‘Hit him!’ yelled Huy. ‘Kill him!’ And half blinded with spray, Lannon hammered at the enormous snout. Some of the blows were wild, crunching against the side of the skiff and splintering the planking.

‘Not the boat, you fool. Hit the fish! ’ shouted Huy, and at last the fish was dead, hanging in the water beside the boat.

Laughing and panting and cursing, they got a heavy line through its gills and dragged it aboard, slithering in over the gunwale, slimy and black with a belly of bright silver, and bulging eyes. The whiskers above its gaping mouth still twitched and quivered as it filled the bottom of the boat, twice as long as Huy and with a body too thick to encompass within the circle of his arms.

‘It’s a monster,’ panted Huy. ‘The biggest I have ever seen.’

‘You called me a fool,’ said Lannon.

‘Nay, Majesty, I was talking to myself,’ grinned Huy, and he unstoppered the amphora and poured wine for them.

Lannon lifted his bowl to Huy, and grinned at him over the rim.

‘Fly for me, bird of the sun.’

‘Roar for me, Gry-Lion.’ And they drained the bowls at the same time, then laughed together like children.

‘It has been too long, Huy,’ Lannon told him. ‘We must do this more often. We grow old too swiftly, you and I, our cares and duties envelop us and we are caught in a web of our own making.’ A shadow passed across Lannon’s eyes, and he sighed. ‘I have been happy these last few days, truly happy for the first time in many years.’ He looked up at Huy almost shyly. ‘You are good for me, old friend.’

He reached out and clasped Huy’s shoulder awkwardly. ‘I do not know what I would do without you. Don’t ever desert me, Huy.’

Huy flushed, clumsy in his embarrassment, this was a mood of Lannon’s to which he was unaccustomed. ‘Nay, Majesty,’ he answered huskily, ‘I will be with you always.’ And Lannon dropped his hand and laughed, echoing Huy’s embarrassment.

‘Sweet Baal, but we grow sentimental as girls - is it old age do you think, Huy?’ He rinsed his wine bowl over the side, making a great show of it, and avoiding Huy’s eyes. ‘There are still fish in the lake, and an hour or two of the day left, let us use it.’

In the dusk they returned to where their old shack stood, neglected and forlorn beneath the graceful ivory palms above the beach. As Huy poled the skiff around the point of the island, and they cleared the reed banks, they saw the galley lying at anchor in the bay. The royal standard of house Barca stood at her masthead, and there were lamps burning at stem and stern. The reflections of the lamps danced on the dark waters, and the sound of voices carried clearly to them.

Huy stopped the skiff and leaned on the pole, and in silence they stared at the long ship. Then Lannon spoke.

‘The world has found us out, Huy.’ And his voice was tired and resigned. ‘Hail them for me.’

The lamp hanging in its chain from the roof of the stern cabin lit their faces unnaturally, highlighting cheeks and noses but leaving the eyes in shadow. Their faces were grim as they gathered about the table, and listened to the messenger from the north. Although he was young, an ensign in his first year of military service, yet he had the poise of high birth and he gave his report lucidly.

He described the ripples of unrest that had lapped along the northern borders in the last few weeks, small incidents, movements of large bodies of men seen at a distance, the smoke and fires of vast encampments. Spies reported rumours of strange occurrences, of a new god with the talons of an eagle and the claws of a lion, who would lead the tribes to a land of grass and water. Scouts had watched the sailing of many Drav vessels along the eastern reaches of the great river, an unusual coming and going, talk of secret meetings between nobody knew whom.

There was a restlessness, a vast stirring and muttering, a sense of pressures and tensions building, of secret affairs afoot. The itching of storm clouds gathering and lightning brewing. Things felt but not understood, signs pointing into the unknown.

Lannon listened quietly, frowning a little, his chin propped on his fist and his eyes in shadow.

‘My commander bids me tell you of his fears that you might find all this fancy and starting at the hooting of owls.’

‘No.’ Lannon brushed aside the boy’s plea for his report to be taken seriously. ‘I know old Marmon better than that. He does not call out snake for an earthworm.’

‘There is more,’ said the boy, and he laid a leather bag upon the table. He loosed the drawstring and shook out a number of metal objects.

‘One of the river patrols surprised a party of pagans attempting to cross in the night. They carried these, all of them.’

Lannon picked up one of the heavy spear-heads, and examined it curiously. The shape and workmanship were distinctive and he glanced up at Huy.

‘Well?’ he asked and had his own opinions confirmed when Huy answered,

‘Drav. No doubt of it.’

‘Carried by the pagans?’

‘Perhaps they were taken from dead Dravs, or stolen.’

‘Perhaps,’ Lannon nodded. He was silent a while longer then he looked up at the young officer. ‘You have done well,’ he said and the lad flushed with pleasure. Lannon turned next to Habbakuk Lal. ‘Can you take us on another night run to Opet?’ And the admiral smiled and nodded.

Lannon and Huy stood together at the stern rail and watched their island merge into the darkness as the galley drew swiftly away, leaving its wake shimmering in the light of the moon.

‘I wonder when we will next return here, Huy,’ Lannon asked softly, and Huy moved restlessly beside him but did not answer. ‘I feel as though I am leaving something behind here. Something valuable which I will never find again,’ Lannon went on. ‘Do you feel it also, Huy?’

‘Perhaps it is our youth, Lannon. Perhaps these last few days were the end of it.’ They were silent then, swaying to the easy motion of the galley under oars. When the island was gone Lannon spoke again.

‘I am sending you to the border, Huy. Be my eyes and ears, old friend.’

‘It is not for long, my heart,’ Huy apologized, although Tanith had said nothing, and was fully engaged in daintily devouring a bunch of purple grapes. ‘I will be back before you know I have gone.’

Tanith pulled a face as though one of the grapes were sour, and Huy studied her face with exasperation. It was serene and lovely and as unyielding as that of the goddess herself.

Huy had come to know all of Tanith’s moods, every expression or tilt of the head that heralded them. He had watched with fascination as she changed from child to full woman, from bud to ripe bloom, and he had studied her with the patience and dedication of love, but this was one mood he had not learned how to distract.

Tanith licked her long tapered thumb and forefinger with the tip of a pink tongue, then examined her hand with interest, twisting it from side to side to catch the light.

‘There is nobody else that the king can trust to send on this mission. It is a matter of grave importance.’

‘I am sure,’ Tanith murmured, still examining her hand. ‘Just as there was no other who could go with him to stick fish.’

‘Now, Tanith,’ Huy explained reasonably. ‘Lannon and I have been companions since our childhood. We used to go out to the islands often in the old days. It was like a pilgrimage to revisit our youths.’

‘While I sit here with a bellyful of your child, alone.’

‘It was but five days,’ Huy pointed out.

‘But five days!’ Tanith mimicked him with her cheeks flushing, signalling the change of her mood from ice to fire. ‘I swear on my love of the goddess, that I do not understand you! You profess your love for me, yet when Lannon Hycanus crooks a finger you run to him, panting like a puppy dog and roll on your back that he may tickle your belly!’

‘Tanith!’ Huy began to grin. ‘I swear you are jealous!’

‘Jealous, it is!’ Tanith cried, and snatched up the fruit bowl. ‘I’ll give you jealous!’ She hurled the bowl, and while it was in flight she was reaching for fresh missiles.

Old Aina, nodding in the sunlight at the end of the terrace, awoke in the midst of the storm and joined Huy in flight. They found shelter behind an angle of the wall, and from there Huy cautiously reconnoitred the field and found it deserted, but he could hear Tanith weeping somewhere in the house.

‘Where is she?’ quavered Aina.

‘In the house,’ answered Huy, combing fruit from his beard and mopping at wine stains on his tunic.

‘What is she doing?’

‘Weeping,’ Huy said.

‘Go to her,’ commanded Aina.

‘And if she attacks me again?’ Huy asked nervously.

‘Spank her,’ instructed Aina. ‘Then kiss her.’ And she gave him a toothless but utterly knowing grin.

‘Forgive me, Holy Father,’ whispered Tanith and her tears were warm and wet upon Huy’s neck. ‘It was childish of me, I know, but every moment I spend away from you is a piece of my life wasted.’

Huy held her, stroking her hair, gentling her, and his chest felt congested and swollen with the strength of his love for her. He was close to tears himself as he listened to her voice.

‘Is it not possible for me to go with you this time?’ She made one last appeal. ‘Please, Holy Father. Please, my love.’

Huy’s response was regretful but firm. ‘No. I go fast and hard, and you are already in your third month.’

She accepted it at last. She sat up on the couch and dried her eyes. Her smile was only a little lopsided as she asked, ‘Won’t you tell me again of the arrangements you have made for the baby?’

She sat beside him, soft and warm, with her pale skin glowing over the faint bulge of her belly and the new heaviness of her breasts m the lamplight. Her eyes were intent as she listened, and she nodded and smiled and exclaimed as Huy told her how it would be - of the foster mother he had selected in the cool and healthy air of the hills, on the estate at Zeng. He told her how the child would grow healthy and strong, and how they would visit it there.

‘It?’ Tanith demanded playfully. ‘Never it, my lord - her!’

‘Him!’ Huy corrected and they laughed. But beneath Tanith’s laughter the sadness persisted. This was not the way it would be. She could not see this, she could not catch the happiness of it, could not hear the laughter of a child nor feel the warmth of its little body against her.

For a moment the dark curtains of time opened, and, as sometimes happened, she glimpsed the future, saw dark shapes and men and things that terrified her.

She clung to Huy and listened to his voice. It gave her comfort and strength, and at last she asked softly, ‘If I fetch your lute, will you sing for me?’

And he sang the poem to Tanith, but there were new verses now. Every time he sang it, there were new verses.

Marmon was the captain of the north, governor of the northern kingdom and commander of the legions and forts that guarded the northern border. He was an old friend of Huy’s, thirty years his senior but with the bond of scholarship between them. Marmon was a keen military historian, and Huy was helping him with a manuscript history of the third war with Rome. He was a tall bony man with a fine mane of silver hair of which he was inordinately proud. He kept it shampooed and neatly clubbed. His skin was smooth as a girl’s and firmly drawn over the prominent bones of his skull, but the shivering sickness had yellowed the tone of his complexion and yellowed the whites of his eyes also.

He was one of the empire’s most trusted generals, and for two days he and Huy discussed the situation along the border, poring over a clay-box map of the territory so that Marmon could show Huy exactly where each piece of the puzzle fitted in. Marmon’s fine-boned hands touched each of the counters, or drew out the lines and areas of disturbance and dispute, while Huy listened and asked his questions.

At the end of the second day they ate the evening meal together, sitting up on the ramparts of the fortress for the sake of the cool evening breeze. A slave girl anointed their limbs with perfumed oil to discourage the mosquitoes and Marmon filled Huy’s wine bowl with his own hands, but did not drink himself. The shivering sickness damages a man’s liver, and for him wine turns to poison.

Huy thanked Baal for the immunity that the gods had given him against the ravages of this disease which flourished in the hot lowlands of swamp and river. Huy’s mind chased after the thought: Why did the disease kill some, cripple others and leave others untouched? Why did it strike only in the lowlands, and leave the cool uplands untainted? He must think about it more, try and find answers to these questions.

However, Marmon was talking again now and Huy stopped his mind from wandering, brought it back to the problem in hand.

‘I am at last building up a system of spies upon which I can rely,’ Marmon was saying. ‘I have men with the tribes who report to me regularly.’

‘I should like to meet some of them,’ Huy intervened.

‘I would rather that you did not, Holiness,’ Marmon began, then noticed Huy’s expression and went on smoothly. ‘I expect one of them to report within the next few days. He is my most reliable informant. A man named Storch, a Vendi, an ex-slave. Through him I am recruiting a body of spies across the river.’

‘I will speak with him,’ said Huy, and the conversation changed, Marmon asking advice of Huy about his manuscript. As old friends they talked on, until darkness had fallen and the servants lit torches for them. At last Marmon asked deferentially, ‘My lord, I have been petitioned by my officers. Some of them have never heard you sing, and those who have wish to hear it again. They are importunate, Holiness, but I trust you will bear with them.’

‘Send to my quarters for my lute.’ Huy shrugged with resignation, and one of the young officers stepped forward with the lute.

‘We have already presumed. Holy Father.’

Huy sang the songs of the legions, the drinking and marching songs, the bawdy songs and the songs of glory. They loved it. The officers crowded silently about Huy on the ramparts, and in the courtyard below the common soldiers gathered with their faces upturned, ready to come crashing in with the chorus.

It was late when an aide pressed through the throng and spoke quietly to Marmon. He nodded and dismissed the aide before whispering to Huy, ‘Holiness, the man I spoke of has come.’

Huy set aside the lute. ‘Where is he?’

‘In my quarters.’

‘Let us go to him,’ suggested Huy.

Storch was a tall man, with the distinctive willowy grace displayed by so many of the Vendi, but the smooth velvety black skin of his shoulders was marred by the thickened scars of the slave lash.

He noticed Huy’s glance and adjusted his cloak to cover the ugly cicatrice, and it seemed to Huy there was a flash of defiance in his eyes although his face was handsome and impassive.

‘He speaks no Punic, Marmon explained. ’But I know you speak the dialect.‘

Huy nodded, and the spy looked at him a moment longer before he addressed Marmon. His voice was quiet, without either anger or accusation.

‘It was our agreement that no other should see my face,’ he said.

‘This is different,’ Marmon explained quickly. ‘This is no ordinary man, but the High Priest of Opet and the General of all the armies of the king.’ Marmon paused. ‘This is Huy Ben-Amon.’

The spy nodded, his face still showed no expression, not even when Huy spoke in Vendi.

They talked for an hour, and at the end of it Huy turned to Marmon, speaking in Punic.

‘This disagrees with much else you have told me.’ Huy frowned and knocked his knuckles irritably against the table top. ‘This man has heard nothing of a god with lion claws, nor of regiments of trained warriors armed with the weapons of the Drav.’

‘No, Marmon agreed. ’This section of the river is quiet. Our reports come from farther east.‘

‘You have spies there?’ Huy asked.

‘Some, Marmon nodded, and Huy thought a moment.

‘I will move eastward then,’ Huy made up his mind. ‘I will march at dawn.’

‘The patrol galley will arrive in five days.’

‘I will see nothing from the deck of a galley. I will go on foot.’

‘I will have an escort waiting for you before the rise of the sun,’ Marmon offered.

‘No,’ Huy rejected the offer. ‘I will move faster, and draw less attention to myself if I travel alone.’ He glanced again at Storch. ‘This man can serve as a guide, if he is as reliable as you say.’

Marmon relayed Huy’s order to the spy and ended, ‘You may go now. Eat and rest, and be ready before the sun.’

When he was gone Huy looked after Storch for a long moment then asked. ‘How much do you pay such a one?’

‘Very little,’ Marmon admitted. ‘Salt, beads, a few copper ornaments.’

‘I wonder why he does it,’ Huy said softly. ‘Why he works for us when the scars of the lash are fresh upon his body.’

‘I am no longer amazed by the acts of men,’ said Marmon. ‘I have seen too much strange behaviour ever to question a man’s motives.’

‘I never cease to do so,’ murmured Huy, still looking after the spy, troubled by the man’s treachery which jarred so harshly on Huy’s own sense of honour.

Huy’s efforts to find out more about the spy over the next four days met with but small success. Storch was a silent man, speaking only when he was questioned directly, and then answering with words barely sufficient for the occasion. He never looked directly at Huy; his eyes focused to one side of Huy’s face and he looked beyond.

Huy found him a disconcerting companion, though he clearly knew every bend of the river and every fold of the ground over which they travelled.

They called at two of the forts upon the south bank, and from the men who garrisoned them Huy gleaned much firsthand intelligence. Twice they found the sign where large parties of men had crossed the river on mysterious business, and there were other small indications of secret activity which heightened Huy’s feelings of unrest.

It disturbed him that these signs were in contradiction of Storch’s assurances of quiet and stable conditions beyond the river.

They travelled swiftly and silently, slipping like a pair of forest spirits through the dense valley bush. They travelled much in the cool of evening and night and rested in the hissing heat of noon. They ate little, husbanding the contents of the corn bag and not wasting time upon the hunt.

On the fourth day they reached the summit of a small granite hillock from which they could survey a huge area of the valley floor, a panorama that stretched from escarpment to escarpment and only shaded away into the blue haze of distance. Before them the river made a mighty bight towards the south, a wide glittering loop of many miles that twisted back upon itself.

Although the loop was some twenty or twenty-five miles around, yet across the neck was less than five and beyond it stood the squat solid block of another garrison. The smoke from the cooking fires rose in a pale blue feather into the still, hot air.

Huy looked at the twist of the river for a long time, seeing the choice as between a full day’s hard slogging or a quick cut across the neck of the loop with its attendant risk.

‘Storch,’ he said, ‘can we cross the river? Are there men of the tribes here?’

The spy looked away from Huy’s scrutiny, hiding any expression. He sat very still, squatting upon the granite dome beside Huy - and Huy thought he had not understood the question.

‘It would be shorter to cut across the bend. Is it safe?’ he asked again, and Storch replied, ‘I will find out. Wait here for me.’

He returned an hour before dark and led Huy down to the river bank. Hidden in the reeds was a narrow dug-out canoe. The woodwork was rotten with worm, and it stank of old fish. Huy’s suspicion flared.

‘Where did you find this?’

‘There is a family of fishermen camped down stream.’

‘How many?’

‘Four of them, Storch replied.

‘Vendi?’

‘No, men of Sofia.’

‘Warriors?’

‘Fishermen. Old men with grey heads.’

‘You told them about me?’

‘No.’

Huy hesitated, peering into the blank stare of Storch’s eyes, trying to find a hint of treachery there.

‘No,’ said Huy, ‘we will not cross. We will go around the long way.’ It was a test. He waited for Storch’s reaction, waited for him to argue, to attempt to persuade Huy to make the crossing.

‘It is for you so say,’ Storch nodded, and began to cover the canoe with reeds.

‘Very well,’ Huy agreed, ‘take me across.’

Storch used the current to angle the frail little craft across the river. Ahead of them the cormorants beat the water with their wings in their frenzied efforts to launch into flight, while the chocolate and white jacanas scurried across the lily pads and the sinister log-like shapes of the crocodiles slid down the bank into deep water.

They landed on a muddy beach heavily trodden by the hooves of the game that drank here, and Storch hid the canoe. He led Huy up the bank, and into a glade of bright poisonous green swamp grass. They waded waist-deep through the thick clutching stems, and the ground was soggy and yielding underfoot.