Warlock: A Novel of Ancient Egypt

But Daimios seemed not to feel the shallow wound. He came on as strongly as before. They exchanged parry for thrust and block for cut, then Daimios stepped back and circled to the left, trying to move in behind him and cut him off from the bridgehead, but Nefer went at him again and forced him to give ground.

A moment's respite and Nefer saw that the flames had died down, the grass fence burned almost entirely away. The other chasers had left their chariots and were jumping over the bed of glowing ash and running to join the fight.

'Form a ring around him, and cut him down!' Daimios shouted to them as they ran up.

Nefer glanced back and saw that Meren had led Krus far out on the catwalk. The colt was trembling and sweating at the sensation of the moving deck under his hoofs, but he could not see the terrible aching void below him.

Just then the other chasers ran up, brandishing their blades and jeering at Nefer: 'Now, we will ram your hair braid up your right royal arse.'

Nefer retreated quickly on to the head of the bridge. Now they could come at him only one at a time, and the jeers died away. They paused in a group at the head of the catwalk.

'He has nicked me,' said Daimios. 'Do you go after him, Rastafa, while I bind it up.' With his teeth he tore a strip off the hem of his tunic, and tied it over the shallow flesh wound. While he was doing this Rastafa ran out on to the bridge. He was bearded and swarthy with a dark and angry gaze, a big man but quick as a ferret. He balanced easily on the moving deck and thrust at Nefer's throat, coming on so strongly that Nefer had to fall back again.

Krus heard the clash of blades and the shouting close behind him and he reared up in protest. The bridge jumped and wobbled under him, and for a terrible moment it seemed that the colt might lose his balance and go over the side, but by some miraculous chance he came down on all four legs, and stood quivering on the wildly swinging catwalk.

It was Rastafa who stumbled and teetered on the edge. He windmilled his arms as he fought to regain his balance. Nefer took one quick step towards him and stabbed him under his lifted arm. The bronze blade slipped in between the ribs and went in deeply. Rastafa looked at him with mild surprise, and said, 'It hurts. In the name of Seth, it hurts!'

Nefer jerked the blade out and Rastafa's heart-blood fountained after it. Spouting crimson, he toppled backwards, and went spinning into the abyss, arms and legs spread like the spokes of a wheel. His voice was a wild screech, fading in volume as he fell away, and the sound was cut off abruptly as his armour clattered on the rocks in the gut of the gorge. His comrades hesitated at the bridgehead, appalled by the horror of that death plunge, suddenly reluctant to step out on to the narrow way.

Nefer seized that moment to turn back and stroke Krus' trembling haunches, 'Steady, Krus. I am here, my darling. Walk on!' Krus calmed to his voice, and then, as the wild gyrations of the bridge eased, he took a step forward and another.

'Walk on, Krus, walk on.'

They were almost halfway across when Meren shouted a warning: 'Behind you, brother!'

Nefer whirled around just in time to meet another opponent. Nefer knew him by reputation. He was a Libyan slave, and was righting for his freedom. Fearlessly, he ran down the narrow deck, straight at Nefer. He used the full impetus of his charge and Nefer was only just able to turn aside that first stroke. They locked blades and came chest to chest, clamping each other in a murderous embrace with their free arms. They heaved and wrestled, shifting and shoving for the advantage.

Krus heard the struggle behind him and it spurred him on. He lunged forward again, covering another few paces towards the safety of the far bank.

Nefer was face to face with his man. His teeth were black and jagged and his breath stank like rotten fish. He tried to sink those filthy fangs into Nefer's face, snapping at him like a dog, but Nefer pulled back then butted with his forehead, slamming the peak of his leather helmet into the bridge of the man's nose. He felt the bone and gristle break, and the man released his grip and reeled back. He lost his footing and grabbed the side rope of the bridge to steady himself, hanging on desperately, his back arched out over the drop. Nefer chopped off his grasping fingers, and the rope slipped from the bloody severed stubs. He went over backwards, screaming and twisting in the air. He seemed to fall for a long time before he struck the rocks far below with a meaty thump.

There were three men on the catwalk behind him, led by Daimios. He had bound up his wound, and seemed unhurt. But he had seen what had happened to his two comrades and now he was more wary. Nefer engaged him, keeping him off a full blade's length, giving him ground only as Krus moved forward slowly and hesitantly towards the far bank.

Suddenly Meren shouted triumphantly, 'We are across, Nefer.' And he heard Krus' hoofs clatter on the rock bank. 'Krus has come over.'

Nefer could not look round for Daimios blade flashed and gleamed before his eyes, but he shouted, 'Cut down the bridge, Meren, cut away the mainstays, and let her fall.'

Daimios heard the command and jumped back with alarm. He glanced over his shoulder and saw how far he had come out on to the catwalk, how far it was back to the other bank.

Meren stood over the two thick ropes that carried the full weight of the catwalk. He hacked at one, and his first stroke cut halfway through, the strands parted with a sharp popping sound and began to unravel like mating serpents.

Pale horror washed over Daimios' sweaty face and he turned and fled, his comrades with him, back along the narrow way. Nefer whirled and ran towards where Meren stood over the ropes. He reached the end of the bridge and jumped to safety. Immediately he attacked the other mainstay, chopping at it with full overhead blows. One of the stays parted and the entire bridge shivered then tilted violently to one side. Daimios flung himself forward and dragged himself on to firm ground just as the second stay gave way, and the bridge sagged and fell into the abyss.

Daimios recovered and stood on the edge of the precipice, glaring at them across the void. Nefer sheathed his sword and gave him a taunting wave. 'You have a long ride ahead of you.'

Then he ran to help Meren reassemble the chariot. They had practised this a dozen times under Taita's watchful eye. While Meren lifted one side of the chassis Nefer eased the wheels on to the hubs and drove the bronze locking pins home with the mallet. Then they lifted the shaft and fastened it to the ringbolt in the footplate.

Nefer wasted a few seconds to look back across the gorge. He saw that Daimios and the surviving chasers were already mounting their chariots, and through the last wisps of smoke from the smouldering grass fence, he saw them speed away in a line ahead, following the track along the edge of the gorge that would lead them eventually to where the cliffs flattened out, so that they would be able to bring their vehicles and horses across, and renew the pursuit.

'We have won enough time.' Meren tried to sound confident, but the effort of bringing the nervous horses across the bridge had taxed him severely, and he pressed a hand to his injured side.

Nefer feared for him. 'Perhaps, but that will depend on the Red God,' he said and touched the Periapt of Lostris at his throat.

They buckled the horses into the harness and hitched them to the long shaft. Then they scrambled up on to the footplate and started them along the line of marker flags. They could push the horses to the utmost on this stretch, for at the end of it waited Khama of Taurine and Drossa of Indus. The horses might have a long rest indeed while their drivers went into the ring with the two most notorious swordsmen in Aartla's troupe.

Nefer forced the pace, and the marker flags sped by in quick, regular succession. They crested the final rise and saw ahead of them, at the far end of the long, narrow valley, the city of Gallala with her gates standing wide open to welcome them.

But at the head of the valley, between them and the city, gathered in a shallow basin of hills, was a large crowd of many hundreds of persons. It seemed that every last citizen had come out from the city to watch the trial by swords.

They rode down fast, and heard the din of the crowd rise like the sound of storm surf to greet them.

There was a lane through the crowds demarcated by wooden railings that led them to the two rings of white stones in the centre. As they jumped down and the grooms ran forward to hold the horses, Nefer embraced Meren.

'You are sore hurt, brother,' he whispered to him. 'There is no shame in that, for it was a wound received with honour, but it will hamper you. You must not try to confront Drossa, and trade him blow for blow. He is fast and strong, and he wears full armour. Run from him and keep running until I can come to your aid.'

They parted then, each to the ring allotted to them by the umpires and Nefer halted at the line of white-painted stones, and looked at the warrior in the centre.

Khama of Taurine wore full armour, helm, breastplate and greaves. If Nefer and Meren had wanted the same protection they would have had to carry it in the chariot from the start, but the weight of the two suits would have drained even Krus' strength.

From the edge of the ring of stones Nefer studied his man. Khama's helmet was a hideous mask with spread wings above the ears, and the nosepiece was an eagle's beak. The eyes that glittered behind the sockets were inhuman and implacable. His chest was protected by a bronze cuirass. His gauntlets were covered with golden fish scales. He carried a small circular shield on his left shoulder.

'Throat, wrist, armpit, ankles and eyes,' Taita had instructed Nefer. 'All else is covered.'

Nefer lifted the Periapt of Lostris over his head and wound the long golden chain around his left wrist. Then he held the tiny golden figure to his lips and kissed it. He stepped over the white stones and went forward to meet Khama of Taurine.

They circled once to the right, then back, and suddenly Khama burst upon him with a blazing series of thrusts and cuts that were so rapid as almost to cheat the eye. Carrying that weight of armour, Nefer had not expected him to be so fast. He had to exert all of his skill and strength to hold him off, and still he received a cut through his leather body armour that scored his ribs. He felt the hot blood trickle down his flank as they disengaged and circled again.

The crowd was shouting and roaring like a storm sea all around them, but in the sudden quiet as they disengaged he heard a cry of pain from the other ring and he recognized Meren's voice. Meren had taken a hit, and by the sound of it a grievous one. He needed Nefer's help, probably his life depended upon it. But Nefer's own life was in terrible jeopardy, for he had never faced an opponent such as this Khama before.

Even Taita had not been able to divine any weakness in him, but as they came together again in the whirl and clangour of metal on metal, Nefer noticed a tiny flaw. When Khama made a low underhand cut, he opened his right side for an instant and thrust his head forward, an awkward gesture out of keeping with his otherwise fluid and graceful style.

Nefer knew that he could not hold out much longer. Khama was simply too skilful and powerful for him.

'Everything on one throw of the dice.' He took the gamble, and offered his right hip unguarded and like a striking adder Khama went for it with the low cut, his front opened and his head thrust forward. Prepared for it, Nefer swayed his hip out of the shot and the blade slit the hem of his chiton without drawing blood.

The golden Periapt of Lostris twinkled as he spun it on the end of its chain then Nefer whipped it in like a slingshot, using the chain to speed the throw so it became a darting beam of light. It flashed into the eye socket of Khama's helmet and the sharp metal edge sliced deeply through his eyeball.

Khama reeled back with a mixture of eye jelly and blood pouring down his golden mask. He was blinded and disorientated with pain, trying to wrench off his helmet to reach his burst eyeball. As the rim of his helmet lifted and exposed his throat, Nefer drove his point in a thumb's width above the lump of his Adam's apple. The point angled up into the back of his brain, and Khama flung his arms wide and went down, dead before his armour clanged on the sun-baked earth.

Nefer placed his cleated sandal on his throat and had to wrench with all his strength to draw the point of his sword free from where it was trapped between the metal of the helmet and the bone of his skull.

Nefer left the corpse lying, and wrapping the chain of the amulet around his wrist again, ran from the ring. He tried to reach the other ring where he knew Meren was in mortal danger, but the crowds impeded him. He swung his sword to clear the way and the spectators fled screaming ahead of him. He broke through the press and saw that in the second ring Meren had lost his weapon and was bleeding profusely from a terrible gash in his right side, and a cut that had half severed his ear. It dangled down his cheek on a thread of flesh. Somehow he was managing to stay out of Drossa's reach, backing frantically away from him.

Drossa was laughing, bellowing like a bull with the joy of killing, the sound echoing eerily within the confines of his crested war-helmet. He was goading Meren into a position for the killing stroke, taking his time, enjoying it.

Drossa's back was turned to Nefer. Nefer sprang at him and aimed a thrust through the lacing of his cuirass. With the instincts of a wild animal, Drossa sensed the danger and spun to face him, Nefer's thrust struck the metal breastplate and glanced aside and Drossa aimed a full-blooded cut at his head. Nefer ducked and recoiled, and they circled each other.

Meren saw his chance and stooped to pick up the sword he had dropped, but Drossa leaped at him. Meren was so weak that he stumbled backwards and fell. Drossa kicked the fallen sword out of the ring and placed his foot between Meren's shoulders and pinned him down.

'Behold, mighty Pharaoh, feared by all the world, I have your bum-boy in my power.' He feigned the stroke of a headsman, but stopped his blade against the back of Meren's neck. 'Shall I give you his head? A gift fit for a king.'

Nefer felt red blind anger sweep over him, and he rushed at Drossa to drive him off Meren's prostrate form. He felt the sting of the blade across his thigh, which sobered him. He jumped back, and saw by Drossa's eyes in the helmet slits that he was toying with him, drawing the last drop of sadistic pleasure from the encounter. Drossa was an entertainer, and the crowd were loving his performance. They howled their approval.

Suddenly Meren reached up and grasped Drossa's ankle with both bloody hands, and tried to trip him. Drossa stumbled, swore and kicked his foot free, but for an instant he was off-balance and Nefer seized the opportunity and rushed in. He aimed for the throat, into the gap between the chinpiece of the helmet and the top of the breastplate. Drossa twisted away and the point of Nefer's sword rang on metal.

Nefer had missed his chance for a kill, but he had driven Drossa off his victim, and Meren scrambled to his feet and staggered behind Nefer, using him as a protective shield.

They circled again, and Nefer felt the first cold draught of despair lift the hairs on his forearms. He knew he could not expect a man like Drossa to give him another chance. In despair he tried again with the Periapt, swinging it on the length of gold chain and aiming for the eye slits in Drossa's helmet. Drossa dropped his chin and the golden charm glanced off the brow of his helm. If it had not been upon the chain Nefer would have lost it, but he recovered it and let the chain wind itself around his left wrist again.

'That is no weapon but a child's toy.' Drossa laughed scornfully.

They circled and feinted, Drossa moving easily, but Nefer was hampered by his need to guard Meren. He could not launch an attack, and leave Meren unprotected.

Drossa was working the two of them like a sheepdog with a flock of lambs, pushing them back against the line of white stones. He wanted to make a spectacular kill to please the crowd, and enhance his own reputation.

'The chasers!' someone in the crowd yelled, and every head swung and lifted to the crest of the rise at the head of the long valley.

Daimios' chariot raced over the skyline. Desperate to make up for his humiliation at the bridgehead, he was riding hard and outstripped the rest of his troop. He came tearing down towards them at the top of his speed.

'You belong to me, mighty Egypt!' Drossa mocked Nefer. 'I will not let an upstart like Daimios take your hair braid from me.'

He moved in menacingly, and Nefer could see the icy determination in the pale eyes that watched him through the helmet slits.

Nefer whispered to Meren, 'If I fall, save yourself. Step out of the ring.'

'No, Pharaoh, I will ride with you as your lance-bearer on the road to paradise,' Meren said softly, and his strength failed him. His legs gave way under him, and bleeding he sagged to earth. Drossa seized the moment, and came down upon Nefer like an avalanche. His sword clanged and rang on Nefer's desperate guard like a coppersmith's hammer on the anvil.

Each blow jarred and numbed Nefer's right arm to the shoulder, and he knew he could not last out much longer. Still he watched Drossa's eyes to read each blow, and saw them narrow and gleam as he gathered himself for the killing stroke.

It came from on high, like a thunderbolt from the sky and all Nefer could do was lift his own blade above his head to meet it. He knew he could not turn or stop it with one hand, it was too powerful. So he braced his sword hand, gripping the right wrist with his left hand, the hand that held the golden Periapt.

The two swords came together with force that bronze could not resist. Both blades snapped cleanly and spun away, glittering out of the circle of white stones.

At a stroke they were both disarmed, and for an instant they stared at each other in astonishment. Nefer recovered first and hurled the hilt of the sword at Drossa's head. Instinctively Drossa blinked and ducked. Nefer charged him and they came chest to chest.

Like a pair of temple dancers they whirled together, first one way then back again, trying to throw each other. Irresistibly Drossa worked his arms under Nefer's armpits and locked his armoured fists between his shoulder-blades. With wristlets of silver and gauntlets of gold he started to grind Nefer against his bronze cuirass. Nefer had no response as he was lifted off his feet. He had no weapon to defend himself, except the Periapt of Lostris.

With the last of his strength he managed to throw a loop of the gold chain over Drossa's helmet. He took a turn around each of his own wrists and pulled the chain downwards until suddenly it found the gap below the rim of the helmet and closed around Drossa's neck. Nefer strained and sawed the ends of the chain, and felt the golden links biting deeply in living flesh.

Drossa gasped, released his grip and reached up with both hands to try to break free. He seized Nefer's wrists and tried to pull them away from his throat, but this increased the cutting power of the links. Staring into the slits of the helmet, Nefer saw Drossa's eyes start from their sockets and swell with blood. He took another turn around his right wrist and sawed the chain back and forth. Drossa made a gargling sound and a vein popped in one of his eyes. It bulged crimson as a ripe berry from the socket, and still clutching Nefer's wrists Drossa sank to his knees. Nefer stood over him and rolled his wrists, tightening the chain until suddenly he felt it cut through something gristly and Drossa's breath burst explosively from his severed windpipe. Nefer took another wrap of the chain and pulled again, feeling it cut its way down to bone. Blood erupted in thick gouts from under the rim of the helmet, and Nefer gathered himself and exerted all his remaining strength. The chain found the joint between two vertebrae in Drossa's neck and cut through. Drossa's head sprang from his shoulders and, still clad in the heavy helmet, rolled across the ring.

As Nefer staggered backwards he heard the umpire shout, 'You are free and clear,' and he slipped the bloody golden chain back over his head. As he did so he looked over the heads of the maddened crowd, back up the slope of the hill. Daimios' chariot was already halfway down, and coming straight towards him at full gallop.

Nefer stooped over Meren. 'Can you stand?' he asked, but when Meren made the effort his legs collapsed under him and he sprawled on the trampled earth. Nefer pulled him up by one arm then swung the arm over the back of his neck. Taking the weight across his shoulders, he raised Meren to his feet, grabbed him behind the knees and lifted his inert body off the ground, his head dangling down his back and his legs down his front.

Meren was a heavy man, and Nefer was almost exhausted, near the limit of his strength. He staggered with him to the waiting chariot and dropped him in a heap on the floorboards. For a moment he leaned panting against the near wheel, and looked back.

Daimios had reached the level ground at the bottom of the slope, and was less than four hundred paces away, coming on swiftly, so close that Nefer could see the triumphant expression on his face. Daimios leaned forward and cracked the long black lash over the backs of his team and the horses seemed to spring forward, coming on even faster. The chariots of the other chasers were following him down the slope, six of them all told. If he had any thought of standing to fight them, Nefer put it out of his mind at once. In his present state he could not even take on Daimios in a straight fight. He had to run.

Nefer took two turns of the grab rope around Meren's body, worked them up under his armpits and clinched the knot, strapping him to the floorboards. Then he dragged himself up on to the footplate and stood straddling Meren's body,

'Turn them loose!' he called to the grooms, who held the horses' heads, and they released them and jumped out of the way.

'Come away, Dov! Come away, Krus!' he called to them, and snapped the reins along their gleaming backs. They sprang forward together and the crowds scattered ahead of them. He pointed their heads down the valley towards the open gates of the city, and let them run.

Between his feet Meren groaned involuntarily as the chariot jolted and lurched, and Nefer tried to steer to miss the patches of rough ground. Behind him he heard the crack of the lash, he glanced back and saw Daimios bearing down on them. He was flogging on his team and shouting at them angrily, but Dov and Krus were holding them off despite Daimios' cruel work with the whip. Nefer looked ahead and judged the distance they still had to run.

It was less than half a league to the gates of Gallala. Already he could make out the wreaths of palm fronds that adorned the walls and decorated the red stone columns of the entrance.

At that moment he paid the price for his inattention. His off-wheel hit an outcrop of rock at the edge of the track, and the vehicle bounced high and slewed wildly under him. It almost capsized, but as he fought for control Krus leaned into the traces and helped him to pull it straight.

Now when Nefer looked back he saw that the mistake had cost them dear, for Daimios had gained a hundred paces on them. He was within javelin range, and Nefer saw him reach for the missiles in the bin at his side and wind the thong on to his wrist.

Nefer had no reply to him. He and used all his darts at the first stage. He had dropped his bow at the chasm, and his last sword had snapped in the bout with Drossa. He did not even have his whip. His only defence was speed.

He called to his horses, 'Come, Dov! Come away, Krus!' And their ears flicked back as they heard him call their names and their hoofs drummed on the hard earth and the wheel hubs squealed, for even Taita's black oil was running dry.

Then there was the sound of other hoofs, blending with those of Nefer's team, and this time when he looked back Daimios was closer still, his horses whipped and galled until their flanks and backs were bloody. Daimios had a javelin poised and now he hurled it. Nefer watched the dart leave his hand, and fly in like a poisonous insect. He flinched instinctively, as it slammed into the floorboards beside his right foot. It stood out quivering.

'Come away, my darlings.' His voice took on a strident note, and the horses heard it. 'Give me all you've got!' Krus found a little more in his great heart, and swept Dov along with him. They began to pull away from Daimios' scourged and bleeding pair.

'Pull, you swine!' Daimios screamed. 'Pull, or I'll take the hide off your backs.' And as his long lash sang, they raced together as though an invisible rope linked the two vehicles.

Daimios seized another javelin and wrapped the thong. As he swung his arm back for the throw, Nefer judged his moment skilfully and flicked the reins. With the javelin in the air, Dov leaned into Krus' shoulder and they swerved slightly, just enough for the dart to fly past Nefer's shoulder. But the turn had cost ground, and Daimios snatched his last javelin from the bin and wrapped the thong around his wrist. He was close now, very close.

Nefer watched him with a feeling of desperation, gathering his team with a firm rein so they could anticipate his command. The moment Daimios swivelled his right shoulder forward in the throw, Nefer turned his team back the other way, jinking their run at full gallop. But the javelin did not leave Daimios' hand: he had feinted. He raised the javelin again into the ready position, levelled and ready to throw.

Nefer was forced to swing back or leave the track and tear into the rough ground and scattered boulders. He changed the angle and this time Daimios aimed not at Nefer but at Dov, whose flank had been exposed by the turn.

The dart took her high in the shoulder. It cut through hide and bunched muscle, but then struck the bone and did not penetrate to her vitals. It was not a mortal blow, but a crippling one, for the javelin head was barbed and it dangled down her flank, hampering each stride she took.

She tried, she tried with all her heart, but she could no longer keep pace with Krus, and the blood ran back along her flank and splattered on Nefer's legs. He could feel the chariot slowing under him, and though he called to Dov, the javelin slapped against her flank with each stride she took, and tangled in her forelegs.

Daimios sped forward and from the corner of his eye Nefer saw the heads of his racing horses draw level with his near wheel, and Daimios' voice hoarse with effort and triumph sounded almost in his ear.

'It is over, Nefer Seti. I have you now.'

Nefer turned his head and looked across at him. Daimios' lips were drawn back in a horrible rictus, like that of a corpse who had died of the lock-jaw. He had thrown his last javelin, and had discarded his whip, but he had drawn his sword.

How far to run to the gates? Nefer thought. Less than five hundred paces. So close, so very close! But still too far.

Instinctively he looked to the roof of the temple. It was lined with tiny human figures, and among them, just where he expected to see it, he picked out the scarlet of Mintaka's tunic, and saw that she was waving a green branch over her head, her long dark hair tossing like a pennant on the north wind.

A prize beyond all others, he thought, and his hand fell upon Daimios' javelin that was pegged into the floorboard beside his foot. The head was buried deeply into the woodwork, but he braced himself. Twisting and jerking, he pulled it free.

He did not have a throwing thong, but he held it like a spear, and looked across at his adversary. Daimios' eyes narrowed as he saw the weapon in Nefer's hand and he took the guard position with the sword. He drew up inexorably alongside Nefer and lunged. Nefer turned the blow with the stock of the javelin. The two vehicles swerved apart then came back together and struck so hard that Nefer was almost thrown over the side and had to clutch wildly at the reins to steady himself.

Daimios swung a cut at the long staff on which flew Nefer's hair braid, but did not severe the hard bamboo. Nefer recovered his balance and thrust at Daimios with the javelin, driving him off. Now the two vehicles were running wheel to wheel, and hub to hub.

Nefer and Daimios were leaning across, hacking and stabbing at each other. The bronze blade slashed across Nefer's chest, and though he threw himself back against the reins it cut through the leather of his breastplate and he felt the sting of the razor edge. But he thrust the point of the javelin at Daimios face, and forced him to swerve away.

Dov was labouring hard, the barbs of the javelin still fixed in her skin, and the shaft banging her legs at each stride.

Nefer heard the sound of many voices, soft at first and almost drowned in the drumming of hoofs and the squeal and rumble of the wheels, but the sound was growing louder at each stride. He looked up and through the running sweat that stung his eyes saw the gates directly ahead. The city walls and the rooftops were lined with the crowds. Through the hubbub of their cheering, he thought he heard the sound of Mintaka's voice. 'For me, my heart, do this for me!' It may have been but a figment of his own exhaustion, but it steeled him, and he called to the horses and gathered them with the reins. But Dov was staggering and failing.

Daimios came in again, and this time when Nefer thrust at him, he swung a full blow not at the man but at the javelin. His blade sheared through the shaft inches from Nefer's fist, leaving him with a useless stump. Nefer hurled it at Daimio's head but he ducked under it, and struck at Nefer again, forcing him to dodge to the far side of the footplate to avoid the bright blade.

Daimios took instant advantage, and forced his way ahead of Nefer. As he came past he reached across and seized the rod on which Nefer's hair braid danced and whipped in the wind. He tried to snap it off, but although it bent almost double it resisted his efforts. Still holding the staff in one hand Daimios reached up with the other hand for the thick dark hank of hair. It flicked and danced at his fingertips, but he was trying to keep a grip on the hilt of his sword at the same time, and he could not quite get a hold of the trophy. He dropped his sword, and this time caught hold of the braid and tried to tear it free, but the bamboo was resilient and tough, and the braid securely tied.

Krus and Daimios' off-side horse were galloping shoulder to shoulder. Daimios was completely absorbed with trying to wrest his trophy from the bamboo staff. He knew that Nefer was disarmed and no real danger, and he ignored the stone gates that loomed up ahead of them.

'Lean in!' Nefer shouted at Krus, 'Give him your shoulder!' Nefer sawed the reins. This was what they had trained for, all those months in the desert. With Taita driving the other team, Nefer had taught Krus to love this contest of strength, and now he bore in with his great right shoulder, tucking it in just behind the other horse, lifting him off-balance. The locked chariots veered to the right, and the gateway was coming up fast. The portals were columns of hewn red stone, and though the grit-laden winds of the centuries had polished and shaped them they were still massive and forbidding.

'Ride him off!' Nefer shouted to Krus, and encouraged him with a strong hand on the reins. Krus forced the other horse another yard over until he was headed straight for the solid red stone wall.

At the very last instant Daimios became aware of what was happening and, with a wild cry of alarm, he let go of the bamboo rod and tried to recover control of his racing chariot, but Krus dominated the other horse and drove him headlong towards the stone gateway.

Daimios realized that he could not stop the flying chariot and avoid the collision. He tried to jump from the hurtling cockpit, but he was too late. Both his horses ran full tilt into the stone column. It killed them instantly. Nefer heard their last terrified screams as they went in, the crash of the impact, the crackle of their breaking bones and the shattering and rending of timbers. One wheel was torn clean off and for a moment bounced along beside Nefer's vehicle. Daimios was hurled like one of his own javelins straight into the wall. He struck head first and his skull burst as though it were an overripe melon. His strong white teeth were embedded in the surface of the red stone, souvenirs to be prised out later by urchins, threaded on chains of gold and sold in the market-place.

Nefer steered Krus and Dov into the gateway, and though the hub of their near wheel scraped the red stone they tore through into the central avenue of the city, which was lined on both sides by the joyous crowds. They had strewn the paving with palm fronds and flowers and even with shawls and headcloths and other pieces of their own apparel.

Nefer's first concern was for Dov. He halted the horses, jumped down and ran to the wounded filly. The barbs of the javelin were buried deeply in her shoulder. He trusted only Taita to remove them, but he snapped off the shaft, so that it no longer dangled down her side. Then he climbed back to the footplate and took the reins again.

The crowds swarmed into the avenue and ran along beside the chariot as it moved on at a walking pace. They reached up to touch Nefer, using their headcloths to wipe up the blood that dribbled down his legs from his wounds. The blood of a god, a pharaoh and a Red Road warrior would transform the cloth into a sacred relic. Hysterically they screamed their praises.

'Pray for us, mighty Egypt. Pharaoh indeed!'

'Lead us, great Pharaoh. Let us share your glory.'

'Hail, divine brother of the Red God!'

'May you live a thousand and a thousand years, Nefer Seti, true Pharaoh!'

At the entrance to the forum the crowd was so dense that the city guards had to run ahead of the chariot and club them out of the way before Nefer could drive through into the forum.

--

In the centre of the forum on the raised stone dais Hilto and Shabako stood to welcome their new brother warriors. Nefer halted the battered, dusty and blood-splattered chariot below the platform, and the two men came down and helped him lift Meren. Between them they carried him into the temple of Hathor where Taita waited to care for him. They laid Meren on the trestle Taita had prepared, and the old Magus began work on him immediately, first at tending to the deep sword thrust in his side. Merykara's tears fell upon Meren's broken and bleeding body, and anointed his wounds.

The warriors of the Red Road led Nefer back into the forum. Then Nefer went down the steps, lifted the two hair braids from the chariot, and carried them to the brazier that burned on its tripod in the centre of the raised stone dais. He knelt before the brazier, and declared, 'No enemy has laid hands upon these trophies of our honour and valour.' He held them high for all the world to witness, and then he spoke clear and proud: 'I dedicate them to the Red God.'

He flung the hair braids on to the fire. They burned up brightly. Nefer rose to his feet and, weakened by his wounds, swayed as he stood before them. 'I have run the Red Road! Though I lack the years, I have confirmed my right to the double crown of Egypt. I declare myself Pharaoh. The one true Pharaoh. Let any other pretend to the crown at his peril.'

They cheered him then while the warriors of the Red Road knelt before him, kissed his right hand and foot, and swore their allegiance unto death and beyond.

Nefer raised his right arm for silence, but his legs gave way under him and he might have fallen had not Mintaka rushed forward and steadied him. With one arm around her shoulders he looked into her eyes, and whispered, 'What I have done was for this very Egypt and for you, my love.'

His voice was so husky and low that only she heard him. She reached up and kissed him full on the lips, and the populace recognized this gesture as an open declaration of betrothal. They shouted until the echoes startled flocks of rock-pigeons from the cliffs beyond the walls.

--

Floating on the waters of the two great rivers, the city lay before them like a lotus flower, ready for plucking. Its walls were of burned brick. They were twenty-seven cubits thick and taller than the tallest palm trees of this fertile and well-watered land.

'What is their span?' Trok asked Ishtar the Mede. 'How far is it to ride around this city?'

Ten leagues, Majesty.' Ishtar told him. 'Half a day's ride.' Trok stood taller on the footplate of his chariot and shaded his eyes. 'Is that the Blue Gate of legend?' he demanded. He knew that Ishtar had lived in this royal city of Babylon for fifteen years, and had learned much of his magic here in the temple of Marduk.

Even at this distance the gateway glimmered like an enormous gemstone. The threshold was so wide that ten chariots could enter driving abreast, and the carved cedarwood gates were higher than ten men standing on each other's shoulders.

'It is truly blue in colour,' Trok marvelled. 'I have heard that it is covered with lapis lazuli.'

'Not so, Majesty.' Ishtar's face twisted in a condescending grimace. 'They are ceramic tiles. Each tile depicts one of the two thousand and ten gods of Babylon.'

Trok cast a general's eye along the miles of wall on each side of the Blue Gate. There were watchtowers at every two hundred paces, and at regular intervals the massive walls were heavily buttressed. Ishtar knew what he was thinking.

'There is a road along the top of the wall, wide enough for two chariots to ride abreast. Within an hour Sargon can move five thousand men along it to any point that is threatened by a besieging army.'

Trok grunted, to show that he was unimpressed. 'Still and all, any wall can be undermined and sapped. We need only one breach.'

There is an inner wall, divine Pharaoh,' Ishtar murmured in a silky tone. 'It is almost as impregnable as the first.'

'If we cannot go through, we will find a way round.' Trok shrugged, 'Are those the gardens of Sargon's palace?' He jutted out his beribboned beard to indicate the terraces that rose in mighty tiers into the sky. They were so skilfully raised upon each other, a soaring inverted pyramid, that they seemed to float like a mighty eagle with spread wings, free of the bounds of earth.

Ishtar pointed with one sinewy, blue-tattooed arm. There are six terraces built around a vast courtyard, each wider than the one before. The zenana alone has five thousand rooms, one for each of Sargon's wives. His treasury is buried in a deep dungeon below the palace. It is packed with gold to the height of a man's head.'

'Have you seen these wonders with your own eyes?' Trok challenged him.

'Not the zenana,' Ishtar admitted, 'but I have entered the main vault of the treasury, and I tell you straight, King-who-is-a-god, that in all your army you do not have sufficient wagons to carry away such a treasure as lies before you.'

'And I tell you straight, Ishtar the Mede, that I can always build new wagons.' And Trok threw back his head and laughed with animal high spirits.

The march to Babylon had been one long triumph, an unbroken string of victories. They had met Ran, Sargon's eldest son, on the banks of the Bahr al Milh: between the chariots of Trok and Naja they had ground his army like dhurra, and swept the chaff into the lake until the waters ran red with blood, and the bloated corpses floated from one bank to the other.

They had sent Ran's severed head to his father, skewered on a spear. Maddened with grief, Sargon had charged into the trap they had prepared for him. While Naja retreated before him to lure him on, Trok had circled out to the south then come at him from the rear with a thousand chariots. When Sargon turned back to defend his baggage train, they had him in a glittering ring of bronze.

Sargon had managed to break out with fifty chariots but he had left two thousand chariots and eleven thousand men behind him. Trok emasculated the prisoners, an undertaking that took two days to accomplish. But he joined in the work in person, bloody to the elbows like a butcher, and with a ribald jest to each of his victims as he dangled their severed genitalia in front of their eyes. Afterwards he allowed his victims to bleed to death, their blood an offering to Seueth, the hungry god who loved such fare. Trok sent the severed trophies to Sargon, packed in salt, in a hundred cedarwood chests. A subtle warning as to what he might expect when Trok and Naja came to Babylon.

Babylon was built upon the narrow spit of land between the two rivers, the Euphrates to the west and the Tigris to the east. In his headlong retreat Sargon had not been able to destroy the bridges. In any case, it would have taken an army to tear down those massive piers of burned brick on which they were built. Sargon no longer had an army. He had left one depleted regiment of foot to defend the bridges, but they were demoralized and without chariots to support them. They had not lasted long against the two pharaohs.

Trok had bound the survivors hand and foot and dropped them from the central span of the bridge into the broad brown river, and the Egyptian troops had lined the parapet to delight in their antics as they drowned.

Now Babylon lay before them, little more than a year since they had marched from Avaris,

'You know the defences, Ishtar. You helped design some of them. How long before the city falls?' Trok demanded impatiently. 'How long will it take me to breach the walls?'

'The walls are impregnable, Majesty,' said Ishtar.

'We both know that is not true,' Trok told him. 'Given enough time, men and determination, there is no wall built that cannot be breached.'

'A year,' Ishtar murmured thoughtfully. 'Or two, maybe three.' But there was a sly look on his tattooed face, and his eyes were shifty.

Trok laughed and playfully seized a handful of Ishtar's lacquered spiky beard. He twisted it until his blue whorled face contorted with pain and his eyes watered. 'You want to play games with me, wizard. You know how I love a good game, don't you?'

'Mercy, mighty Egypt,' Ishtar whimpered. Trok pushed him away so hard that he almost fell from the footplate of the chariot and had to clutch at the side of the dashboard to steady himself.

'A year, you say? Two? Three? I have not that amount of time to sit here and look upon the beauties and wonders of Babylon. I am in a hurry, Ishtar the Mede, and you know what that means, don't you?'

'I know, god without peer. And I am but a man, fallible and poor.'

'Poor?' Trok shouted in his face. 'By Seueth, you slimy charlatan, you have milked me of a lakh of gold already, and what do I have to show for it?'

'You have a city and an empire. After Egypt itself, the richest in the world. I have laid it at your feet.' He knew Trok well by now, knew just how far he could go.

'I need the key to that city.' Trok watched his face, happy with what he saw there. He knew Ishtar almost as well as the magician knew him.

'It would have to be a key made of gold,' Ishtar mused. 'Perhaps three lakhs of gold?'

Trok let out a great burst of laughter and aimed a blow at his head with a mailed fist. It was not intended to do damage, and Ishtar ducked under it easily.

'With three lakhs I could buy another army.' Trok shook his head and the ribbons in his beard danced like a cloud of butterflies.

'Yonder, in the treasury of Sargon, lie a hundred lakhs. Three from a hundred is a small price to pay.'

'Give me the city, Ishtar. Give it to me within three full moons and you shall have two lakhs of gold from the treasure of Sargon,' he promised.

'If I give it to you before the next full moon?' Ishtar scrubbed his hands together like a carpet trader.

Trok's grin slid from his face at the prospect, and he said seriously, 'Then you shall have your three lakhs, and a convoy of wagons to carry them away.'

--

The army of the two pharaohs went into camp before the Blue Gate, and Trok sent an emissary to Sargon to demand the immediate surrender of the city - 'to save such a prodigy of architecture from the flames, and your person and family and populace from the sword', as Trok humorously phrased his demand. In reply Sargon, sanguine and defiant behind his walls, sent the messenger's decapitated head back to Trok. The preliminaries having been dealt with, Trok and Naja made a circuit of the walls to allow the Babylonians to view their full might and splendour.

They drove the golden chariots, Trok's drawn by six black stallions, Naja's by six white. Heseret rode beside Naja, glittering with jewels and wearing the golden uraeus on her high-piled curls. Behind the golden chariots marched fifty prisoners, Babylonian women captured from the outlying towns and villages between the two rivers. All were pregnant, some very near their time.

They were preceded by a vanguard of five hundred chariots and followed by a rearguard of another five hundred. The slow, stately circuit of the city took all that day, and at sunset they came back to the Blue Gate. Sargon and his war council were gathered on the parapets above the shining gateway.

Sargon was tall and thin, with a shock of silver hair. In his youth he had been a mighty warrior and had conquered the lands as far north as the Black Sea to add to his domains. He had suffered defeat only once in all his campaigns and that had been at the hands of Pharaoh Tamose, the father of Nefer Seti. Now another pair of Egyptians stood at his gates, and he did not delude himself into believing that these would be as merciful as the first.

To confirm him in this belief, Trok had the pregnant women stripped naked and marched forward one at a time. Then, while all the city watched their swollen bellies were slit open, the unborn infants ripped out and the tiny bodies piled on the threshold of the Blue Gate.

'Add these to your army, Sargon,' Trok bellowed up at him. 'You will need every man you can get.'

It had been a long and exciting day for Heseret, and she retired to her tent with all her slave girls, leaving her husband and Trok to pore over a map of the city by lamplight. It was a work of art, drawn on a finely tanned sheepskin, the walls, roads and canals drawn to scale, each of the main buildings depicted in coloured detail.

'How came this into your possession?' Naja demanded.

'Twelve years ago, by the command of King Sargon, I surveyed the city and drew this map with my own hands,' Ishtar replied. 'No other could have achieved such accuracy and beauty.'

'If he commissioned it, why did you not deliver it to Sargon?'

'I did.' Ishtar nodded. 'I delivered the inferior draft to him, while secretly I kept the fair copy you see before you. I knew that one day someone would pay me more handsomely than Sargon ever did.'

For another hour they studied the map, muttering a comment now and then, but for the most part silent and absorbed. As fighting generals with a professional eye for the salient features of a battlefield, they were able to admire the depth and strength of the walls, towers and redoubts that had been built up layer upon layer over the centuries.

At last Trok stood back from the table. 'There is no weakness that I can divine, magician. You were right the first time. It will take three years of hard work to break through those walls. You will have to do better than this to earn your three lakhs.'

'The water,' whispered Ishtar. 'Look to the water.'

'I have looked to the water.' Naja smiled at him, but it was a serpent's smile, cold and thin-lipped. 'There are canals supplying every quarter of the city, enough water to grow Sargon's six terraces of gardens that. reach up into the sky, and to water and feed the city for a hundred years.'

'Pharaoh is all-seeing, all-wise.' Ishtar bowed to him, 'but where does the water come from?'

'From two mighty rivers. After the Nile itself, the mightiest rivers in the world. A supply of water that has not failed in this millennium.'

'But where does the water enter the city? How does it pass through, under or over those walls?' Ishtar insisted, and Naja and Trok exchanged a look of dawning comprehension.

--

Half a mile north of Babylon, outside the city walls, on the east bank of the Euphrates, at a point where the flood broadened and ran sluggishly, stood the temple of Ninurta, the lion-headed winged god of the Euphrates. It was built on stone piers that extended out into the river. The multiple images of the god were engraved on a frieze that ran around all four outer walls. In the Akkadian language, chiselled into the stone lintel over the entrance, was a warning to all who sought to invade the sanctuary, calling down the wrath of the god upon them.

Ishtar the Mede worked a charm on the threshold to nullify the curse, slitting the throats of two captives and splashing their blood on the portals. Once the way was cleared Trok, with twenty troopers at his back, strode through into the temple courtyard where all the purple-robed priests of Ninurta were gathered. They were chanting and gesticulating, waving their arms towards the intruder, splashing water from the Euphrates in his path, invoking Ninurta to build up an invisible wall of magical power to turn Trok back.

Trok strode through the wall without a check and killed the high priest with a single thrust through the old man's throat. Wailing at such sacrilege, the other priests prostrated themselves before him.

Trok sheathed his sword and nodded to the captain, who commanded the guard. 'Kill them all. Make certain no one escapes.'

The work was done swiftly, and when the courtyard was littered with purple-clad bodies Trok commanded, 'Do not throw them into the river. We do not want the city guards to see them float past and guess what we are about.'

Then he turned to watch Ishtar who, once all the priests had been disposed of, had entered the courtyard to work another charm to counteract the baleful influence of the god they had invoked. At the four corners he burned bundles of herbs, which emitted a thick, greasy smoke that was repugnant to Ninurta and, as Trok remarked jovially, to all gods and lesser mortals equally. Once Ishtar had completed the purification, he led the way into the holy places of the temple, and Trok and his troopers followed him, with blood-caked blades bared.

Their cleated sandals rang hollowly in the gloomy recesses of the high, cavernous hall, and even Trok felt a religious chill as they approached the image of the god on his plinth. The lion's head snarled silently and the wings of stone were spread wide. Ishtar declaimed another lengthy prayer to the god to placate him, then led Trok into the narrow space between the rear wall and the idol's back. Here he pointed out a heavily grilled gate built into the body of Ninurta. Trok seized the bars of the grille, and shook them with all his bear-like strength. They did not move.

'There is an easier way, all-wise Pharaoh,' Ishtar suggested sweetly. 'The key will be on the body of the high priest.'

'Fetch it!' Trok snapped at the captain of his guard, who ran. When he returned there was blood on his hands, but he carried a bunch of heavy keys, some of them as long as his forearm. Trok tried two in the lock on the grille, and the second turned the ancient mechanism. The gate swung open on creaking hinges.

Trok peered down a descending spiral staircase into darkness. The air coming up the deep shaft was cold and dank, and he heard the sound of running water far below.

'Bring torches!' he ordered, and the captain sent four of his troopers to take down the burning torches from their brackets. With a torch held above his head, Trok started down the narrow, unprotected stairwell. He went gingerly, for the treads of the stone steps were slimy and slippery. The sound of running water grew louder as he went down.

Ishtar followed him closely. 'This temple and the tunnels beneath it were built almost five hundred years ago,' he told Trok. Now there was the gleam of water below them, and the sound of the torrent running swiftly in the darkness. At last Trok reached the bottom and stepped down on to a stone pier. By the wavering torchlight he saw that they stood in a wide tunnel with a curved roof, an aqueduct of impressive dimensions. The roof and walls were lined with ceramic tiles, laid in geometric patterns. Both ends of the tunnel shaded off into deep darkness.

Ishtar picked a fragment of fungus from the wall and tossed it into the flow. It was whisked away down the duct and disappeared from sight. 'It is deeper than a man's head,' he said, and Trok looked speculatively at the captain of the guard, as though he considered testing that statement. The captain shrank back into the shadows trying to appear insignificant.

'This footpath on which we stand runs the full length of the aqueduct,' Ishtar explained. 'The priests who repair and maintain the tunnel use it to gain access.'

'Where does it start and where does it end?' Trok demanded.

'There is a sump in the bed of the river, under the piers of the temple, into which the water flows. The far end of the aqueduct emerges in the other temple of Ninurta within the walls of Babylon, near the Blue Gate,' Ishtar explained. 'Only the priests know of the existence of this tunnel. All others believe that the water is a benevolent gift from the god. After it gushes from the fountain in the temple precinct, the water is lifted by shadoof, water wheels, to the gardens of the palace, or sent by canals to every quarter of the city.'

'I do believe, Ishtar the Mede, that you are close to earning your three lakhs.' Trok laughed with delight. 'It remains only for you to lead us down this rabbit-hole, and into the city of wonders and treasure, especially the treasure.'

--

Trok reasoned that the priests at the main temple of Ninurta within the city walls must regularly correspond with those in the river temple. Almost certainly they used this aqueduct as a thoroughfare between the two communities. It would not take long for them to discover that something untoward had happened to their brethren in the river temple. He had to make his plans swiftly.

Trok chose two hundred of his best and most reliable men, all members of his own leopard tribe. He divided them into two groups. Once they had fought their way through the aqueduct into the city, the first group were to secure the Blue Gate and keep it open until Pharaoh Naja Kiafan could lead the main force through it. The second, much smaller group were to make their way into the palace, and seize Sargon's treasury before he was able to dispose of the gold. 'Although it would take a thousand wagons to carry it all away,' Ishtar assured him.

The chosen two hundred were dressed in the uniforms of Sargon's army, taken from the prisoners and the dead men left on the battlefield. They wore the long ankle-length tunics of striped material, belted at the waist, and the tall beehive-shaped helmets. Ishtar showed them how to curl their beards and hair into the characteristic ringlets of the Mesopotamians. They wore only a red sash to distinguish them from the foe. Rough copies of the city map were hastily drawn by the army scribes and issued to the captains of both divisions so that they knew the layout of streets and buildings. By evening every man knew exactly what was expected of him once he entered the city.

As soon as it was dark Naja quietly moved his assault force up into position outside the Blue Gate, ready to dash through into the city as soon as Trok's men threw it open.

In the courtyard of the river temple of Ninurta, Trok mustered his division. While it was still daylight, he and Ishtar led them in single file down the spiral staircase to the level of the aqueduct. There was no hurry, for they had many hours in which to make the long subterranean journey. Their cleated sandals had been muffled with leather socks, so their heavy footsteps did not echo along the gloomy tunnel. They marched in silence, every tenth man carrying a torch, giving just sufficient light for the men who followed to make out their footing on the slimy stones of the pier. At their left hand the never-ending flow of water rustled darkly by. Every thousand paces Ishtar stopped to placate the god Ninurta with gifts and incantations, and to clear the way ahead of the magical obstacles and barriers placed by the dead priests.

Nevertheless, the silent march seemed endless to Trok, and it came as a surprise when abruptly Ishtar stopped and pointed ahead. The faint glimmer of light was reflected off the shiny ceramic walls. Trok signalled the men following him to halt, then went forward with Ishtar. Over their own garments they wore headdresses and purple robes taken from the bodies of the slaughtered priests.

As they went towards the source of the light, they saw another grille gate across the tunnel, and the distorted shadows of men thrown on the walls by the light of a torch set in a bracket above the gate. As they drew closer they saw that on the other side of the grille two robed priests were seated on stools, with the bao board between them, absorbed in their game. They looked up when Ishtar called softly to them. The fat one stood up and wobbled to the gate. 'Are you from Sinna?' he called. 'Yes!' Ishtar assured him.

'You are late. We have been waiting since nightfall. You should have been here hours ago. The high priest will be displeased.'

'I am sorry,' Ishtar sounded contrite, 'but you know Sinna.'

The fat priest chuckled. 'Yes, I know Sinna. He taught me my responses thirty years ago.'

His key jangled in the lock of the gate, and then he swung it open. 'You must hurry,' he said. Trok trotted forward with the hood over his face, holding his sword in the fold of his robe. The priest stood back against the wall to let him pass. Trok stopped in front of him, and whispered, 'Ninurta will reward you, brother,' and killed him with a thrust up under his chin into his brain.

With a shout of alarm, his companion leaped to his feet, knocking over the bao board and scattering the stones across the pier. With two long strides Trok reached him and chopped his head half off. Without another sound, the priest fell backwards into the dark stream and, with his robes ballooning about him buoying him up, he was carried away down the tunnel.

Trok gave a soft whistle and, with the muted tramp of muffled feet his men moved up into the torchlight with drawn swords. Ishtar led them forward until they reached the foot of another steep stone stairway. They went up it quickly until they came to a heavy curtain blocking their way. Ishtar peeped around its edge and nodded. 'The temple is empty.'

Trok stepped through, and looked about him. This temple was even larger and more impressive than the river temple. The ceiling was so high that the light from fifty torches was eaten up by the shadows. Below them the image of the god crouched over the mouth of the shaft from which the full force of the aqueduct spurted like a gigantic fountain into a deep pond with a white marble coping. The corpse of the priest that Trok had almost decapitated was floating in the pool, from which the water spilled over into the canal that carried it to the city. Although the smell of incense was thick in the air, the great hall of the temple was deserted.

Trok signalled his men to come forward. As soon as they emerged from the tunnel they formed up behind their captains in silence. Trok gave the hand signal and they went forward at a trot. Ishtar led the smaller band through a side door of the hall into a corridor that connected with the palace of Sargon. Trok led his men out into the narrow lane behind the temple and, working only from his memory of the map, turned at the second lane into the wide avenue that he knew led to the Blue Gate. It was still dark and the stars blazed above the sleeping city.

They met a number of cloaked figures on the way, one or two staggering drunk, but the others scurried out of their way and let the dark column of armed warriors pass. A woman with a child in her arms called after them, 'May Marduk smile upon you, brave warriors, and keep us safe from Trok, the barbarian of Egypt.' Trok understood just enough Akkadian to catch her meaning, and smiled into his beard.

Disguised in their plundered robes, they reached the end of the avenue without being challenged further, but as the gateway loomed ahead a voice sang out at them from the door of the guardhouse.

'Stand ho! Give the watchword for tonight.' The centurion of the gate with five men at his back, stepped out into the torchlight. But they were ill-prepared, without helmets and body armour, their eyes puffy and their faces still crumpled with sleep.

'The honourable emissary of King Sargon to the pharaohs of Egypt,' Trok mumbled in execrable Akkadian, and gave the hand signal for his troops to charge. 'Open the gate and stand aside!' He ran straight at the centurion.

For a moment longer the man stood uncertainly. Then he saw the glint of swords and shouted urgently, 'Stand to arms. Turn out the guard.' But it was too late. Trok was on him, and dropped him in his tracks with a single blow. His men swarmed over the other guards before they could defend themselves, but the noise had alerted the sentinels on the parapets above the gate. They sounded the alarm with braying ram's horns, and hurled their javelins down into the attackers.

'Winkle them out of there!' Trok ordered, and half of his men rushed up the ramps on either side of the gateway to reach the parapet. They were at once locked in close and desperate fighting with the guards on the wall. Trok kept half of his men with him.

Ishtar had described the gate room that housed the complicated machinery, a system of heavy winches and pulleys, that operated the massive gates. Trok led his men to the entrance before the defenders within could close the doors, and after only a few minutes of furious fighting they had killed or wounded most of them. The survivors threw down their weapons, some fell to their knees and pleaded in vain for quarter. They were stabbed and clubbed as they knelt. The others fled out of the postern gate, and Trok led his men to the massive winches. With two men on each spoke of the capstans they began to open the gates.

But the ram's horns had aroused the city guards, who swarmed out of their barracks, some without armour and still half asleep, and rushed to defend the gateway.

Trok barred the heavy door to the winch room and placed men at the entrance to defend it. On the parapets above the gateway his men had killed the defenders or thrown them from the top of the wall, and now they fought on the ramps, holding off the attacking Babylonians.

The door to the winch room trembled and bulged as the Babylonians battered at it, trying desperately to break in, but the winches revolved slowly to the efforts of Trok's men, and the mighty gates rose from their seatings, the gap under them widening inexorably.

The avenue leading to the gates was by now crowded with Babylonian defenders, but they were hampered by their own numbers. Only four abreast could mount the ramps to the top of the walls, and Trok's men met them and hurled them back. Others were still trying to break into the room that housed the winches, but the doors were sturdy. When at last they smashed them down they found Trok and his men waiting for them on the threshold.

Outside the walls Naja's men had swarmed forward with crowbars and levers. They forced the heavy gates wider and wider, until at last a squadron of chariots could pass through. Then they stood aside, and Naja led a phalanx of fighting chariots in a brutal charge through the gateway, and swept the avenue from side to side. The army of Egypt poured through behind them. Trok took command of diem and led them rampaging through the city towards the palace.

The sack of Babylon had begun.

--

The defence of the palace was stubborn, led by Sargon himself. However, by that evening Trok had opened a breach in the outer walls of the first terrace. He led a strong contingent through and the defence collapsed. When they burst into Sargon's bedchamber he was kneeling before the image of Marduk, the devouring god of Mesopotamia, with a bloody sword in his hands. Beside him lay the body of his favourite wife, a grey-haired woman who had been with him for thirty years. He had given her a merciful death, compared to what she might have expected from Trok's men. However, Sargon had not been able to steel himself to fall on his own sword. Trok knocked the weapon out of his grasp.

'We have much to discuss, Your Majesty,' he promised him. 'Was it not you who referred to me as the Black Beast of Seueth? I hope to convince you that you painted me the wrong colour.'

The women from the zenana were herded out of the palace, only five hundred of them, not the five thousand of which Ishtar had spoken. Trok selected twenty, the youngest and prettiest, for his personal entertainment, and the rest were given to his senior officers. After they had enjoyed them, they would be passed on to the common soldiery.

It took another two days to break into the treasury buried deep in the earth below the palace, for many ingenious constructions and devices guarded it. Without the expertise and first-hand knowledge of Ishtar the Mede, it might have taken even longer to penetrate to the main treasure chamber.

When the way was clear, Trok and Naja, Heseret following them, descended the stairway and entered the chamber. Ishtar had lit the interior with a hundred oil lamps, their rays cunningly reflected by burnished copper mirrors to show off the booty to full effect.

Even the two pharaohs and Heseret were stunned into silence by the splendour of the treasure. The silver had been cast into bars, the gold into conical ingots that fitted into each other to facilitate stacking. They were all stamped with the goldsmiths' marks and the royal cartouche of Sargon.

Heseret, for once speechless, had to shade her delicate eyes against the dazzle of the masses of precious metal. Naja walked forward slowly between the stacks, which were higher than his head, stopping every few paces to stroke the ingots. At last he regained his voice and whispered, 'They feel warm and smooth as the body of a virgin.'

Trok picked up a heavy bar in each hand and laughed with delight. 'How much?' he demanded of Ishtar.

'Alas, splendid and divine Majesty, we have not yet had the opportunity to count it. But we have consulted the scrolls of Sargon's scribes. They record the total weight of silver at fifty-five lakhs, the gold at thirty-three.' He spread his tattooed hands deprecatingly. 'But who would trust the count of a Babylonian?'

'Sargon is a greater robber than I gave him credit for.' Trok made it sound like a compliment.

'At least there is enough here to pay me the pittance you promised me?' Ishtar suggested smoothly.

'I think we should discuss that further.' Trok smiled at him genially. 'I am a kindly and generous man, Ishtar, as you know full well. However, over-generosity is a form of stupidity. Stupid I am not.'

Once he had finished gloating over the contents of the treasury, there was much else to see and marvel at within the city. Trok and Naja toured the palace, climbing to the top terrace with its fountains, gardens and groves. From this height they could look down on both the great rivers and the vista of fields, marshes and papyrus beds outside the city walls.

Next they visited all the temples, for these magnificent buildings were also stuffed with bullion, beautiful furniture, statuary, mosaics and other works of art. As they removed these Naja and Trok spoke to the incumbent god in conversational tones, as brother gods and equals. Trok explained that Babylon was no longer a capital city but merely a satrapy of Egypt. Therefore the god should remove his earthly seat to Avaris, where Trok undertook to provide him with suitable accommodation. The removal of the god's wealth should be considered in the nature of a loan which would later be repaid.

The greatest of these temples was that of Marduk the Devourer. Trok found this to be not only a mine of precious metal and jewellery but a place of endless fascination.

Ishtar was a disciple of Marduk, and as a young man had studied the mysteries in this same temple under the high priest. As he had not yet been paid his reward, he stuck as close to Trok as a tick to the belly of a lion. He instructed Trok in the worship of Marduk, and Trok remarked, 'Marduk has tastes very close to those of my own familiar, Seueth. They might well be brothers.'

'As always, Your Majesty is perspicacious. However, Marduk had a far greater appetite for human sacrifice than Seueth. And he is particular about how it is presented to him.'

He led Trok through the maze of passageways and corridors, through gardens, courtyards and echoing halls into the holy of holies deep in the heart of the temple, which was a small city in itself. They came at last to the furnace complex.

When they stood above the main sacrificial chamber, Trok gazed down into the gut of it in total fascination. He was amazed by the design and the construction. 'Describe it to me,' he ordered Ishtar.

There are two furnaces, not a single one, one behind each of those walls.' Ishtar pointed down at the walls of shining copper. 'When the charcoal fires are lit they are fanned with great bellows, until the metal walls glow like the rising sun with the heat. The walls are movable. By means of pulleys the priests are able to roll them forward, or pull them apart..."

When Ishtar had finished his explanation, Trok thumped his mailed fist into the palm of his other hand. 'In the names of Seueth and Marduk, I have never heard the like. I must see it demonstrated. If it is as you describe, I will have the same contraption built in my own temple in Avaris. Order the priests to fire up their infernal furnaces. We will celebrate my victory with a sacrifice to Marduk.'

'It will take several days for the furnaces to reach the desired heat,' Ishtar warned him.

'I have several days,' Trok said. 'I have to supervise the consignment of the booty, and also I must see to the contentment and well-being of twenty of Sargon's young wives.' He rolled his eyes. 'A most arduous task. In any event, my ruffians are still busy sacking the city. It will be some time yet before I can bring them back to their senses.'

Three days later Trok held a victory banquet for his senior officers on the upper terrace of the great palace. The guests reclined among groves of orange trees growing in huge clay pots, all in full blossom so the air was filled with their sweet perfume. Around them the fountains tinkled and burbled. The banquet table was covered with silken carpets. The bowls and vessels were of silver and gold and set with precious stones -they had been taken from the temple offertories. The stools on which the guests sat were Sargon's wives, kneeling naked except for their golden chains. Later when the flagons of foaming beer and the sweet wine had taken effect, the living stools were used as pillows and mattresses.

In the midst of this revelry Ishtar crept to Trok's side, and whispered in his ear, 'Pharaoh god, who swallows the seas and eats the stars, the furnaces are ready.'

Trok staggered to his feet and clapped his hands. 'Gentle brethren!' he addressed his officers, and they roared with laughter at the jest. 'I have an entertainment to offer you. Follow me!' And he made unsteadily for the staircase with his men crowding after him.

They lined the parapet of the gallery, and looked down into the sacrificial chamber. Smoke shimmered from the twin chimneys above their heads, and they began to sweat in the heat reflected from the glowing metal walls.

'We are gathered here today to make sacrifice to the great god Marduk, who has given us his city as a prize of war,' Trok told them, imitating the sing-song, sanctimonious tones of a high priest. They cheered him delightedly.

'What better sacrifice can we offer than a king and his royal family?' They cheered again.

Trok waved to Ishtar, who darted down the stairway to the chamber below where a hundred slaves stood at the windlasses ready to activate the mechanism. At a signal from the high priest they began to chant a hymn to Marduk.

The priest stepped out on to his pulpit above the open chamber with its glowing walls. With the chanting slaves as a background, he lifted both arms and began to sing a prayer to the god in a reedy falsetto voice.

At his signal a small door opened in the fixed stone wall of the furnace chamber, and another priest led in a file of human beings. They were clad in simple white tunics, and wore no adornment other than the halters around their necks.

They were of both sexes, and all ages. Some were mere infants carried in their mothers' arms; some were toddlers; others were on the verge of adolescence. But the tallest was a lean white-haired man with the carriage of a king and a warrior.

'Hail, Sargon, mighty ruler of heaven and the sacred earth between the two great rivers,' Trok mocked him. 'I am about to do for you what you did not have the courage to do for yourself. I am sending you as a messenger into the loving arms of your god, Marduk the Devourer. Because I am a compassionate man and I do not want your wives, your little sons and daughters to mourn you, I am sending them with you to keep you company on the way.' He paused to let the laughter of his men subside. Then he went on, 'Give this message to Marduk, when you stand face to face with him. Tell him that Trok, his divine brother, greets him, and demands his good favour.'

Sargon gathered his sons around him and did not deign to look up at Trok or to reply to his words.

Trok looked across at the high priest. 'Now, priest, show us how this machine of yours works.'

The high priest began to sing again, but a different prayer, harsh and primitive. In the room behind him the slaves sang with him, and in unison took a step forward then brought their bare soles down on the stone slabs with a sound like a clap of thunder. One step at a time the windlass began to turn.

At first nothing appeared to change then Ishtar whispered, 'Observe the burning walls, mighty Trok, greatest of all hero kings. See how they begin to move towards each other, slowly. Oh, so slowly. Until they meet at last, and the sacrifices crisp and blacken like moths in the lamp flame.'

Trok leaned forward, his face bright with sweat and anticipation.

--

Marduk is pleased,' Ishtar announced, looking up from the bowl. 'The sacrifice that you made to him in the furnace was most acceptable to him.'

Trok nodded. 'Tell my brother Marduk that I am pleased he is pleased.'

Trok knelt on a pile of leopardskins spread on the stone floor in the inner sanctum of the temple before the altar of Marduk the Devourer. The golden image of the god was of a comely youth, with a smiling countenance. The statue was three or four times life-sized. The only characteristics that distinguished the god from a mortal, other than his size, were tiny goatlike horns on each side of his curly head and cloven hoofs instead of feet.

'You told me that Marduk was a terrible god, crueller and fiercer than any other in the pantheon, more ferocious even than Seueth,' Trok had challenged Ishtar when first he had seen the image, 'yet this is a pretty boy.'

'Divine Pharaoh, be not deceived!' Ishtar had warned him. This is the face that Marduk shows the world of men. His true aspect is so hideous that any man who looks upon it is instantly rendered blind and slobbering twitching mad.'

Sobered by that thought Trok had knelt before the image and remained silent while the priests had brought in twin newborn infants, and offered them to the god. Ishtar had slit their throats so skilfully that they made hardly a cry as they bled into the golden divination bowl that he held beneath them.

When the small exsanguinated bodies were dropped into the marble chute that led to the furnace beneath the sanctum, Ishtar had placed the golden bowl before the altar and lit the incense braziers. Chanting and mumbling, he threw handfuls of herbs on the flames until the vault filled with wreaths of blue smoke and the air became fragrant and enervating. After a while Trok found it difficult to think clearly and his vision became distorted so that the shadows seemed to waver and dance, and he heard the sounds of distant, mocking laughter. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to the lids. When he opened them again he saw that the sweet smile on the face of the god had become a leer so obscene and frightening that his skin crawled as though poisonous insects were creeping upon it. He tried to look away but found he could not.

The great god Marduk is pleased,' Ishtar repeated, reading the auguries reflected in the surface of the blood-filled bowl. 'He deigns to answer your questions.'

Tell Marduk that I honour him as my peer. I shall send a thousand more sacrifices into his furnace.'

'Marduk hears you.' Ishtar picked up the bowl and peered into it. After a long silence he began to rock gently back and forth with the bowl in his lap. He looked up at last. 'Behold Marduk, the great god of Babylon! Speak to us, dreadful one, we entreat you!'

He opened his arms to the golden statue, and the god spoke in the voice of a child, lisping and mellifluous.

'I greet you, my brother Trok,' said this strange voice. 'You wish to know about the fledgling falcon that spreads its wings and sharpens its talons in the desert places.'

Trok was startled not only by the disembodied voice but also by the accuracy of this statement. Indeed, he had intended asking for counsel on his plans to attack and destroy Nefer Seti. He tried to reply, but his throat was closed and as dry as the wrappings of an ancient mummy.

The sweet, childlike voice went on, 'You have had good counsel from my loyal servant Ishtar the Mede. It was as well that you hearkened to him. If you had not done so, if you had marched on Gallala when you purposed to do so, you would have encountered a disaster even greater than the khamsin winds that destroyed and buried your legions.'

Trok recalled bitterly how Ishtar had dissuaded him from leading another army into the eastern desert to attack Nefer Seti and to capture Mintaka, his runaway woman. Long ago his spies had reported to him the exact whereabouts of the pair at Gallala. He had assembled another force of chariots and foot soldiers for the expedition. He knew that if he did not rid himself of this challenge to his throne, if he did not crush the boy pharaoh before he attained his full strength, then soon the rebellions and insurrections would spread through his entire realm. Once that happened he knew that the dynasty he was founding would end in destruction and extinction. As much as he longed to rid himself of the challenge and the threat of Nefer Seti, he longed much more to recapture the only woman who had ever humiliated and defied him. His hatred for her surpassed any other of his emotions.

Ishtar had prevented him marching. With predictions of dire consequences, with warnings of disaster and death, Ishtar had persuaded him to divert his forces into this joint expedition with Naja to the fabled city of Babylon. Although, thus far, the expedition had turned out to be a triumph, although the booty and the slaughter had been beyond counting, still Trok felt himself unfulfilled.

He spoke as much to himself as to the golden god when he growled, 'I must have Nefer Seti. The double crown will sit uneasily on my head until I kill him and throw his body on the flames so that he will never know resurrection. Already I have expunged his name and the name of his sire from every edifice and monument in Egypt, but I must destroy him and his memory for ever.'

In his anger and hatred he sprang to his feet, and shouted at Ishtar and his god, 'You have cheated me of my destiny once before with your ill omens and baleful warnings. Now I address you as your peer, your equal, and not as a worshipper. I demand that you deliver the person and the soul of Nefer Seti to me, in justice and retribution. I will not accept another refusal from you and your minion here.' In his fury and frustration Trok aimed a kick at Ishtar. The Mede saw it coming and rolled aside. Trok's bronze-cleated sandal caught the divining bowl and the blood of the babes splattered across the flags and down the front of the altar.

Even Trok was appalled by what he had done. He stood frozen before the image waiting for the reaction of the god.

'Sacrilege!' Ishtar wailed. Trok Uruk, now your enterprise is surely doomed.' Then he prostrated himself in the puddle of blood, so terror-stricken that he could not raise his eyes to the image.

A dreadful hush had fallen over the sanctum. The faint rumble of the flames of the sacrificial furnace under the stone floor on which they stood seemed to enhance it.

Then there was a sound, soft but unmistakable. It was the sound of breathing, like that of a sleeping child to begin with but then growing harsher and stronger. Now it was the breathing of a wild beast, then of some monster that echoed through the temple. At last it became the furious sound of an outraged god, roaring like all the storms of the heavens, thundering like the galeswept waves of the ocean. So terrible was it that even Ishtar the Mede whimpered like a child.

'The god will never allow you to succeed now. You dare not march against Taita and his protégé, not until the Warlock is dead,' Ishtar whispered.

Then a terrible voice spoke, so harsh and unearthly that it raked Trok's nerves and made him shudder. 'Hear me! Trok Uruk, you mortal man who claims to be part of the godhead!' The thunder echoed and rolled around the dark recess of the sanctum. 'You know that you are no god. Hear me, blasphemer! If you march against Gallala in defiance of me and my prophet, Ishtar the Mede, I shall destroy you and your army just as I buried your other army in the sands of the desert. This time you shall not escape my wrath.'

Even though he was befuddled by the poisonous smoke of the incense braziers, and fearful of the rage of Marduk that filled the temple, Trok was still cunning enough to sense some false note in Ishtar's protestations, something not convincing in the force of Marduk's fury.

He gathered his courage, which had been scattered by the supernatural manifestations of the god, and tried to identify exactly what had given him pause. He realized that the sound of the bestial breathing, and the thunderous voice issued from the belly of the golden statue. He stared at it hard and saw that the navel of the god was a dark slit. He took a step towards the statue and Ishtar raised his head in alarm and cried, 'Beware, Pharaoh! The god is angry. Do not approach him.'

Trok ignored him and took another step forward, staring at the god's belly button. He saw a faint gleam in the depths of the aperture, a shadowy movement. Often in battle he had sensed the exact moment when the fates had swung in his favour and he felt it now. He steeled himself and shouted, above the awful sound of the god's breathing, 'I defy you, Marduk the Devourer! Strike me down if you are able. Heap your temple fires upon me, if you can!'

Suspicion became certainty as that glimmer showed again in the slit in the god's belly, and the breathing faltered. Trok drew his sword and, with the flat of the blade, knocked Ishtar out of his way. Then he ran forward, darting behind the golden image. Quickly he examined the back, tapping the metal with the tip of his blade. It sounded hollow as a drum, and when he looked more closely he discovered a removable panel that fitted almost perfectly.

'A trap-door!' he growled. 'It seems that there is more in Marduk's belly than ever went in through his mouth.'

He ducked back and peered into the slit in the god's belly. A human eye looked back at him. The pupil widened with astonishment, and Trok gave a mighty shout: 'Come out of there, you slime of the great beast!' He placed his shoulder against the idol and heaved with all his strength. The statue wobbled on its stone base, and Trok heaved again. Slowly the image went down with a crash on to the stone flags. Ishtar screamed and leaped out of the way as it threatened to crush him.

The head of the god was bent at an angle by the fall, and in the silence after the shattering impact there was a scrabbling sound, like startled rats, from the interior of the fallen idol. The trap-door flew open and a small figure crawled out. Trok seized it by its thick head of curls. 'Mercy, great King Trok,' the girl pleaded, in that honey-sweet voice. 'It was not I who tried to deceive you. I was doing the bidding of others.' She was such a lovely child that, for a moment, Trok felt his rage subside. Then he snatched her up by the ankles and dangled her upside-down in one fist. She was weeping and writhing in his grip. •

'Who ordered you to this?' Trok demanded.

'Ishtar the Mede,' she wept.

Trok swung her twice in a circle around his head, building up speed and momentum, then dashed the child against the temple column. Her screams were cut off instantly. Trok let her corpse drop in a crumpled heap on the altar.

He turned back to the golden idol and thrust his sword into the opening of the trapdoor, rummaging around in the belly of the God. There was another squeal and a grotesque creature shot out of the opening. At first Trok thought it was a huge bullfrog, and jumped back in alarm. Then he saw that it was a hunch-backed dwarf, even shorter and smaller than the girl he had just killed. The dwarf bellowed with a voice like a bull, the deafening roars out of keeping with his diminutive stature. He was the ugliest man Trok had ever laid eyes upon, with eyes out of kilter and of disparate sizes. Clumps of black hair bushed out of his ears and nostrils, and from the huge moles that hung from his face.

'Forgive me, that I tried to deceive you, mighty god and King of Egypt!' Trok slashed at him with the sword, but the creature ducked and dodged and leaped nimbly about the sanctum, roaring with terror in that outlandish voice. Trok found himself laughing at his antics. The dwarf shot behind the curtains at the back of the chamber and disappeared through a secret doorway.

Trok let him go and turned back to Ishtar, just in time to seize a handful of his stiff-lacquered hair as he tried to flee from the chamber. He flung him full length on the stone floor and kicked him in the ribs, belly and back. 'You have lied to me.' Trok was no longer laughing, and his face turned dark purple with rage. 'You have deliberately misled me. You have diverted me from my purpose.'

'Please, master,' Ishtar wailed, rolling across the floor to avoid the savage kicks, 'it was for your good alone.'

'Was it for my good that you allowed the spawn of Tamose to flourish in Gallala unchecked, and to spread rebellion and sedition throughout my realm?' Trok bellowed. 'Do you think I am mad, and so stupid that I should believe that?'

'It is true,' Ishtar blubbered, as Trok's toe caught him in the ribs and knocked him over on his back. 'How could we go against a Warlock who commands the storm to his will as though it were his pet dog?'

'You are afraid of Taita.' Trok stood back to regain his breath. 'The Warlock?' he demanded incredulously.

'He overlooks us. He can turn my own spells back upon me! I cannot prevail against him. I sought only to save you from him, great Pharaoh.'

'You sought only to save your own blue-tattooed skin,' Trok snarled, and rushed in again to slam kicks into Ishtar's doubled-up body.

'I beg of you, first of all the gods,' Ishtar covered his head with both arms, 'give me my reward and let me go. Taita has dissipated my powers. I cannot confront him again. I can be of no further use to you.'

Trok stood with one foot drawn back, frozen in the act of delivering another kick. 'Your reward?' he demanded in astonishment. 'Surely you do not believe that I will reward your disloyalty with three lakhs of gold.'

Ishtar came up on his knees and tried to kiss Trok's foot. 'I have given you Babylon, great master. You cannot deny me what was promised.'

Trok laughed angrily. 'I can deny you anything I please to. Even life itself. If you wish to live another day then you will lead me to Gallala, and take your chances in a trial of magical strength with the Warlock.'

--

It seemed that all Egypt had heard that Nefer Seti had run the Red Road and was ordained in his kingship. Each day visitors from all over the country arrived in Gallala. Some were the colonels and captains of the regiments that Trok and Naja had left to guard Egypt in their absence. Others were emissaries of the elders of the great cities along the Nile - Avaris and Memphis, Thebes and Aswan - and the high priests from the temples in those cities. Sickened and saddened by the tyrannies and excesses of Naja and Trok, and emboldened by their absence in Babylon so far to the east, all had come to swear allegiance to Nefer Seti.

The populace of Egypt is ready to welcome you,' the emissaries told him.

'Our regiments will declare for you as soon as you step again on to the sacred soil, and they see your face, and know that the rumours of your survival are true,' the captains assured him.

Nefer and Taita questioned them keenly, demanding to know the muster of their regiments and their state of readiness. It soon became apparent that Trok and Naja had skimmed the cream of the regiments for their Mesopotamian adventure, and left only the reserve battalions, made up mostly of new recruits, the very young and untried, or the elderly nearing the end of their military lives, tired and unfit, already looking forward to the retirement and their little plot of land near the river where they could sit in the sun and play with their grandchildren.

'What of the chariots and horses?' Nefer asked the crucial question. The captains shook their grey heads and looked grave. 'Trok and Naja stripped the regiments bare. Almost every vehicle went with them on the western road. They left hardly enough to patrol the eastern borders to discourage the Bedouin raiders from the desert.'

'What about the workshops in Memphis, Avaris and Thebes?' Nefer wanted to know. 'Each of them can turn out at least fifty chariots in a month.'

'As soon as horses are trained to pull them, they are sent to the east to join the army of the twin pharaohs in Babylon.'

Taita assessed this information. 'The false pharaohs are fully aware of the threat we pose to their rear. They want to ensure that if the regiments they have left in Egypt rebel against them and declare for the true Pharaoh, Nefer Seti, they will lack cavalry and chariots to be an effective force.'

'You must return to your regiments,' Nefer ordered the officers. 'We are too many in Gallala already, and we are near the limits of our food and water. Do not allow any more vehicles or horses to leave Egypt. Keep your men in training, and equip the best of them with the new chariots as they become available. I will come to you soon, very soon, to lead you against the tyrants.' They left, praising his name, and with renewed assurances of their loyalty.

'You dare not fulfil your promise to them prematurely. You can only return to Egypt with a powerful force under your command, well trained and well equipped,' Taita advised Nefer. 'These captains who have come over to you are good, loyal men, and I know you can count on them. However, there will be many others who remain true to Trok and Naja, either in fear of the consequences when the false pharaohs return or because they believe in their divine right to rule. Also, there will be many who are undecided, but who will turn against you if they detect any weakness.'

Then we have much to do.' Nefer accepted this advice. 'We must still break the last of the horses we took at Thane and complete the repairs to the chariots from the dunes. Then our men must finish their training so that they can stand up against Trok and Naja's veterans. When we have done these things, we will return to Egypt.'

So the little army of Gallala redoubled its efforts to build itself into a force to challenge the might of the false pharaohs. They were inspired by their young commander, for Nefer worked harder than any of them. He rode out with the first squadrons long before dawn, and with the other warriors of the Red Road at his side, and Taita to advise him, he gradually forged his divisions into a cohesive body. When he rode back into the city, weary and dusty, in the evening, he would go to the workshops where he cajoled and argued with the foremen armourers and chariot builders. Then, after he had eaten, he would sit up in the lamp-light with Taita, going over the battle plans and the dispositions of their forces. Usually it was after midnight when he stumbled to his bedchamber. Mintaka woke and rose from the bed without complaint to help him strip off his armour and sandals and to bathe his feet and massage aching muscles with sweet oils. Then she warmed a bowl of wine and honey to help him sleep. Often the bowl dropped from his hand before he had finished it, and his head flopped back on to the pillow. Then she would slip off her chiton, take his head on to her bosom and hold him until he woke to dawn's first promise.

--

Each day Meren sank a little lower from the wounds he had received on the Red Road. Taita had strapped his broken ribs and they had healed swiftly enough. He had sewn back the torn ear so neatly that now it was cocked only slightly awry, and Merykara thought that the half-moon scar down his cheek made him look older and more distinguished. However, the sword thrust under his arm worried even Taita: when he probed it he knew from its angle and depth that the weapon must have penetrated Meren's lung. Twice, when it seemed to have healed over, the wound broke open again and leaked foul-smelling pus and fluid. Sometimes Meren was lucid, able to sit up and eat without assistance. Then, when the morbid humours welled up again, he sank back into semi-consciousness and fever.

Merykara stayed at his bedside, changing his dressings and anointing the wound with the unguent Taita brewed for her. When Meren was stronger she sang to him and related all the news of the city and the army. She played bao with him, and made up rhymes and riddles to amuse him. When the wound turned again, she fed him and bathed him like a baby, stroking his sweat-soaked head until he calmed. At night she slept at the foot of his bed, coming awake immediately every time he stirred and muttered in delirium.

She came to know his body as intimately as if he had been her own child. She cleaned his teeth with the green twigs of the acacia tree, chewing the ends into a stiff brush with her own small white teeth. She dressed his hair, brushing it until it grew out long enough to plait again. She trimmed his nails, and came to know and love the shape of his fingers calloused by the hilt of sword and chariot reins. She scraped the wax from his ears, and the dried mucus from his nostrils without the slightest revulsion. She used her own ivory comb on the soft dark hair that grew in thick clumps under his arms, curled on his chest and nestled at the base of his belly.

Each morning she washed every part of him, every crease, plane and bulge of hard muscle, and mourned as his flesh melted off him in the fevers and his bones began to show through.

At first she averted her eyes from his manly parts as she washed them, but soon this seemed prudish to her. Then she cupped them in the hollow of her hand and studied them closely. They invoked in her feelings of tenderness and compassion. They were so soft and warm, the skin so smooth and flawless. Then her emotions changed when she gently drew back the skin in the way that Mintaka had shown her, and the pink tip popped out, silky as an oleander petal. It stiffened and swelled in her hand until she could barely encompass its girth with her thumb and forefinger. When this happened she felt a strange, breathless sensation, and a warmth in the most unlikely parts of her own anatomy.

One night she woke with the moonlight from the window lying like a silver bar across the stone floor of the chamber. For a moment she thought she was in her own bedchamber in the river palace of Thebes, but then she heard Meren's painful breathing, the incoherent cries inspired by his nightmare, and it all came back to her with a rush of dread. She jumped up naked from her mattress at the foot of his couch and ran to him.

When she lit the lamp, she saw that his eyes were wide open but unseeing, and that his face was ashen and contorted, there was a white scum on his lips and his body was shining with running sweat. He was throwing himself about so violently on the crumpled linen sheets that she was terrified he would injure himself further. She knew that this was the crisis Taita had warned her to expect.

'Taita!' she screamed. 'Please, we need you now.' Taita's cell was across the courtyard from theirs, and he always slept with his door open so that he could hear her call.

Taita!' she shrieked again, as she threw herself across Meren's chest to restrain him. Then she remembered that the Magus had gone into the desert with Nefer and a squadron of chariots on some mysterious expedition, and it was unlikely that they would return for many days. She thought of calling Mintaka, but her chamber was at the other end of the ancient palace, and she dared not leave Meren.

She was on her own. She knew that Meren's life was in her hands, and at that thought she felt her panic subside. A cool determination took its place. She lay against him and held him tightly, whispering encouragement and reassurance. After a while he calmed so that she could leave him for a moment. She went to the chest against the window wall, found the vial that Taita had left for her, mixed the pungent contents with wine and warmed it on the brazier as he had instructed her.

When she held the goblet to Meren's lips he tried to refuse, but she forced him to drink. When the bowl was empty she heated water and washed the sweat from his face, the scum from his lips. She was about to wash his body when a sudden seizure racked him, and he began to shake and groan. Her terror returned in full force. She flung herself on him and clung to him with all her strength. 'Do not die, my darling,' she pleaded with him, and then in a stronger voice, 'I will not let you die. O Hathor, help me. I will drag him back from the underworld with my own hands.' She knew she was in a battle, and she fought with him, extending all her strength and adding it to his. When she felt him go limp in her arms and his sweat-drenched body start to cool, she cried out, 'No, Meren, come back! Come back to me. You cannot go without me.

She placed her mouth over his and tried to breathe her own life into him. Suddenly he gave an explosive gasp, emptying his lungs, and she thought it was all over. She hugged him with both arms around his bony chest, and when she released the pressure he took another noisy breath, then another and another. The flutter of his heart become a strong, regular thumping that reverberated through her frame.

'You have come back,' she whispered. 'You have come back to me.' He was still cold, and when he shivered, she held him with both her arms around his chest, and wrapped her legs around his hips, warming him with her own body. Slowly, his breathing became deep and regular, and she felt the warm blood flowing back into his veins. She lay with him and felt a deep sense of fulfilment, for she knew that she had saved him, and that from this night onwards he would belong to her alone.

In the dawn another miracle occurred. She felt his body awaken, and what she had once held soft and small in the palm of her hand now swelled against her once more, becoming enormous, hard as bone, pressing up between her spread thighs.

She looked into his face and saw that he was conscious, his eyes dark and sunken in the wasted sockets, but with an expression of such awe and tenderness in them that her heart swelled within her chest so that she felt she might suffocate with the strength of her own torrential emotions.

'Yes?' he asked.

'Yes,' she answered. 'It is what I want more than anything else in all the world.' She spread herself, and reached down to guide him, aching inside with her need for him, taking him in deeply to the core of her existence, rising with him as if on wings to a place she had never been before, then crying out as she felt him fill her with a hot flood, as though she had drawn out of him and into her own body all his fever and pain and suffering, sensing the deep peace in him as he slumped against her and slept.

She lay quietly beside him, careful not to disturb him, revelling in the sound of his breathing and the warmth of his thin, ravaged body, savouring the ache where he had been deep within her.

She felt him coming awake and kissed him gently on the lips to welcome him back. He opened his eyes and looked into hers, first with bewilderment and then with dawning joy as the events of the night came back to him.

'I want you to be my wife,' he said.

'I am your wife already,' she replied, 'and I will be your wife until the day I die.'

--

Nefer looked back along the column of chariots. They were at full gallop, four abreast. The platoon commanders were watching for his signal. He looked ahead and saw the line of enemy foot soldiers out in the plain, distorted by the heat mirage so that they seemed to be a wriggling serpent, swimming in a lake of shimmering water where there was no water. He steered for their centre. Under Taita's care, Dov had fully recovered from her wound and now she ran strongly, matching Krus' long stride.

As they raced in he saw the enemy formation change: like a giant hedgehog, the line rolled itself into a ball, a tight circle two ranks deep, facing outwards, the outer rank with their long lances levelled, and the second rank with their lances thrust through the gaps, so that they offered a glittering wall of bronze spearheads. Nefer raced straight at the centre of the double row of lances, and then, when they were only two hundred paces away, he gave the hand signal for the 'wings of Horus'.

The formation of chariots opened like a blossom in the sun, successive ranks wheeling alternately right and left, spreading the wings of Horus to envelop the hedgehog of crouching infantrymen. The chariots whirled around them like the rim of a wheel around the hub, and the arrows from the short recurved cavalry bows flew into them in a dark cloud.

Nefer gave the signal to break off the attack and withdraw. Smoothly the chariots re-formed into columns of four and wheeled away. Another signal, and they split down the centre and came racing back, their javelins poised and the throwing thongs wound around their wrists.

As he swept past the infantry circle, Nefer raised his right fist in a salute, and shouted, 'Well done! That was much better.'

The foot-soldiers raised their lances to acknowledge his praise and shouted, 'Nefer Seti and Horus!'

Nefer slowed the horses and turned them, trotting back to halt his squadron in front of the ranks of infantry. Taita stepped out of the defensive circle to greet him.

'Any injuries?' Nefer asked. Even though the tips of the practice arrows they had shot into the hedgehog were padded with leather, they could still knock out an eye or inflict other damage.

'A few bruises.' Taita shrugged.

'They have done well,' Nefer said, then shouted to the centurion commanding the infantry, 'Let your lads fall out. I want to speak to them. Afterwards they can eat and drink. Then we will practise the false retreat again.'

There was an outcrop of rock that formed a natural podium, and Nefer climbed to the top of it while all the men, infantry and charioteers, gathered below him.

Taita squatted at the base of the rock and watched and listened. Nefer reminded him strongly of Pharaoh Tamose, his father, at the same age. He had the easy manner, and spoke simply but effectively in the colloquial language that his men understood best. At times like these he became one of them, and the warmth and respect they felt for him was evident in the way they responded, grinning and crowding closer to catch every word, laughing at his jests, scowling with shame at his rebukes, and glowing at his compliments.

Nefer reviewed the morning's exercises, giving them the credit they deserved, but ruthlessly picking out every deficiency in their performance.

'I think you are almost ready to give Trok and Naja the surprise of their pretty lives,' he ended. 'Now, get something to eat. We have not finished for the day - in fact we have barely begun.' They laughed and began to disperse.

Nefer jumped down from the rock, and as he did so Taita sprang to his feet and said quietly but urgently, 'Stop, Nefer! Do not move!' Nefer froze where he stood.

The cobra must have had its nest in the rock pile, but the noise and the trampling of feet and hoofs had disturbed it. It came slithering out of the crack in the dark rock just as Nefer jumped down and landed almost on top of it. The serpent reared up behind him, almost as high as his waist. Its hood was flared open, and its feathery black tongue flickered between the thin grinning lips. Its eyes were beads of polished onyx, with sparks of light in the black centres, and they were fastened on Nefer's long bare legs within easy striking distance in front of it.

The nearest men had heard Taita's warning and they turned back. Now almost five hundred men were gathered around Nefer, but none dared move. They stared in horror at the mortal predicament of their pharaoh.

The cobra gaped wide, the preliminary to the attack, and the bony fangs came erect in the pale roof of its mouth. Drops of venom sparkled on the needle points.

Taita swung the Periapt of Lostris on its long chain like a pendulum, and it twinkled in the sunlight. He sent it swinging past the cobra's raised head. Distracted, the serpent swivelled its eyes away from Nefer to stare at the glittering charm. Taita had his staff in his other hand, and he edged closer. 'When I strike, jump clear,' he whispered, and Nefer nodded. Taita moved gradually out to one side and the cobra turned with him, fascinated by the golden charm.

'Now!' said Taita, and thrust at the cobra with his staff. At the same instant Nefer jumped clear, and the snake struck at the staff. Taita jerked away, so the cobra missed and for an instant it was stretched out along the bare earth. With a movement even faster than the strike, Taita pinned it behind the head with the curved end of the staff, and a shout of relief went up from the watchers.

The cobra writhed and coiled into a glittering scaly ball around the end of the staff. Taita reached down and worked his hand through the heaving coils until he could grip the snake behind its head. Then he lifted it up and showed it to the men, who gasped with fear and horror. They shrank back instinctively as it coiled around Taita's long, thin arm. They had expected him to kill it but, still carrying the writhing snake, Taita walked through their ranks, out into the open desert.

There he threw the serpent from him. As it struck the ground it uncoiled and slithered away across the rocky earth. Taita watched it, rapt.

Suddenly there was a shrill cry from the sky above. They had all been so intent on the capture of the cobra that no one had seen the falcon hovering high in the blue above them. Now it stooped towards the earth, dropping towards the cobra. At the last moment the snake became aware of the danger and reared up again, its hood spread wide. In full flight the falcon sank its talons into the flared hood, an inch behind the head, then rose on heavily flogging wings, carrying the cobra dangling and twisting below it.

Taita watched the bird as it bore away the snake. It dwindled in size in the distance and at last disappeared into the blue-grey heat-haze that shrouded the horizon. Taita stood a long time staring after it. When he turned and walked back to where Nefer stood his expression was grave, and he was silent for the rest of that day. In the evening he rode back to Gallala in the chariot beside Nefer, still silent.

'It was an omen,' Nefer said, and glanced at him. He saw by Taita's face that this was so. 'I have listened to the men,' Nefer went on quietly. 'They are disturbed. None of them has ever seen the like before. The cobra is not the natural prey of the royal falcon.'

'Yes,' said Taita. 'It was an omen, a warning and a promise from the god.'

'What does it mean?' Nefer studied his face.

'The cobra threatened you. That means great danger. The royal bird flew towards the east with the snake in its talons. It means great danger in the east. But in the end the falcon triumphed.'

They both looked towards the east. 'We will take out a scouting expedition tomorrow at the first light of dawn,' Nefer decided.

--

In the chill darkness before the dawn Nefer and Taita waited on the mountain-top. The rest of the scouting party were encamped on the back slope. All told they were twenty men. For the sake of stealth they had left the chariots in Gallala and they travelled on horseback. Wheels threw more dust than hoofs alone, and hoofs made accessible these high, precipitous places along the coast where wheels could not travel.

Hilto and Shabako had taken other scouting parties to cover the terrain to the south; between them they could sweep all the eastern approaches to Gallala.

Nefer had brought his party from the Gebel Ataqa down along the western shores of the Red Sea, looking in on every port and fishing village along the way. Apart from a few trading caravans and wandering bands of Bedouin they had found nothing, no sign of the danger foreshadowed by the omen. Now they were camped above the port of Safaga.

Taita and Nefer had woken in the darkness and left the camp to climb to the look-out peak. They sat close together in companionable silence. Nefer spoke at last.

'Could it have been a false omen?'

Taita grunted and spat. 'A falcon with a cobra in his talons? It is not in nature. It was an omen, without doubt, but false perhaps. Ishtar the Mede and others are capable of setting such snares. It is possible.'

'But you do not think it is?' Nefer insisted. 'You would not have driven us so hard if you believed it to be false.'

'The dawn comes on apace.' Taita avoided the question, and looked instead to the darkling eastern sky, where the morning star hung, like a lantern, low on the horizon. The sky softened like a ripening fruit, turning the colour of persimmon and ripe pomegranate. The mountains of the far shore were black and sharp and ragged as the fangs of an ancient crocodile against the lightening backdrop of the heavens.

Taita stood up suddenly and leaned on his staff. Nefer never failed to be amazed by the acuity of those pale old eyes. He knew Taita had seen something. Nefer stood up beside him.

'What is it, Old Father?'

Taita laid a hand on his arm. The omen was not false,' he said simply. The danger is here.'

The sea was turning the grey of a dove's belly, but as the light strengthened the surface was speckled with white.

'The wind has whipped the sea into white horses,' Nefer said.

'No.' Taita shook his head. 'Those are not breakers. They're sails. A fleet under sail.'

The sun pushed its upper rim above the tops of the far mountains, and sparkled on the tiny triangles of white. Like a vast flock of egrets returning to the roost, a fleet of dhows was heading into the port of Safaga.

'If this is the army of Trok and Naja, why would they come by sea?' Nefer asked quietly.

'It is the direct and shortest route from Mesopotamia. The boat crossing will save the horses and the men from the hard road through the desert. Without the warning of the snake and the falcon, we would not have expected danger from this direction,' Taita answered. 'It is a cunning move.' He nodded approval. 'It seems that they have commandeered every trading vessel and fishing boat in the entire Red Sea to make the crossing.'

They scrambled back down the mountain to the camp in the gorge below. The troopers were awake and alert. Nefer called in the sentries and gave them their orders. Two would ride back with all speed to Gallala, carrying his orders to Socco, whom he had left in command of the city. Most of the other men he split into pairs and sent south to find the scouting parties under Hilto and Shabako and bring them in. He kept five troopers with him.

Nefer and Taita watched the men he had despatched ride away, then they mounted and rode down through the hills towards Safaga, with the five men Nefer had selected following them. They reached the high ground above the port in the middle of the morning. Taita led them to an abandoned watchtower that overlooked the port and the approaches. They left the horses in the care of the troopers and climbed the rickety ladder to the top platform of the tower.

The first boats are entering the bay.' Nefer pointed them out. They were deeply laden but with the wind on the quarter they came in swiftly with the bow waves curling white as salt in the sunlight and the big lateen sails bulging.

They rounded up just off the beach and dropped the heavy coral anchors. From the top of the tower Nefer and Taita had a fine view down on to the open decks, which were crowded with men and horses. As soon as the dhows were anchored the men removed the wooden gunwales along the dhows' sides. Their faint cries carried up to the ruined watchtower as they urged the horses to leap out. They struck the water with tall splashes of spray. Then the men stripped down to loincloths and jumped in after them. They seized the horses' manes and swam alongside them to the beach. The animals came ashore shaking the water from their bodies in a fine mist that turned to rainbows in the sunlight.

Within an hour the beach was swarming with men and horses, and defensive pickets had been set up around the mud-daub buildings of the little port.

'If only we had a squadron of chariots,' Nefer lamented, 'this would be the time to strike. With only half their force ashore and their chariots broken down, we could cut them to pieces.' Taita made no reply to such wishful speculation.

By now the bay was filled with shipping. The boats carrying the chariots and the baggage had anchored close in, and as the tide ran out from under them they took the ground and listed over. Soon the water was only knee deep around their hulls. The men from the beach waded out to begin unloading. They carried the parts of the broken-down chariots ashore and reassembled them on the beach.

The sun was setting over the western mountains when the last dhow entered the bay. This was the largest of them all, and at the peak of her stubby mast she flew the snarling leopard head gonfalon and the gaudy colours of the House of Trok Uruk.

'There he is.' Nefer pointed to the unmistakable figure in the bows.

'And that is Ishtar beside Trok, the dog and its master.' Taita had a fierce gleam in his pale eyes that Nefer had seldom seen before. They watched the strange pair wade ashore.

There was a stone jetty running out across the beach. Trok mounted it. It gave him a vantage-point from which to watch the disembarkation of the rest of his army.

'Do you see Naja's standard on any of the other ships?' Nefer asked, and Taita shook his head.

'Trok alone leads the expedition. He must have left Naja to hold Babylon and Mesopotamia. He has come to take care of personal business.'

'How do you know that?' Nefer demanded.

'There is an aura around him. It is like a dark red cloud. I can sense it even from here,' Taita said softly. 'All that hatred is focused on one person alone. He would never let Naja or anyone else share in the lust for revenge that has brought him here.'

'I am the object of his hatred?' Nefer asked.

'No, not you.'

'Who, then?'

'Above all else he comes for Mintaka.'

When the sun set, Nefer and Taita left the five troopers to shadow Trok's advance and rode hard through the night, back towards Gallala.

--

The morning after his landing at Safaga, Trok captured two Bedouin leading a string of donkeys down the road to Safaga. Unsuspecting, they walked out of the desert straight into the arms of his pickets. Trok's reputation had penetrated even into these desert fastnesses, so as soon as they learned who was their captor the Bedouin were desperate to please. They gave Trok tantalizing accounts of the resurrection of the ancient city. They told him of the fountain of sweet water that now flowed from the cave in the hills, and of the pastures of lush grass that surrounded Gallala. They also gave him an estimate of the numbers of chariots that Nefer Seti commanded, and Trok realized that he outnumbered his enemies five to one. Most important of all, they gave him details of the route from Safaga to the ancient city. Up to now Trok had had only second-hand knowledge of the approach march to Gallala, and it seemed that he had been misinformed. He had been told that even travelling fast it was a journey of three of four days, and he had planned on carrying his own water and fodder wagons with him from the coast. This would have been a long and laborious process. This new intelligence changed everything. The Bedouin assured him he could reach Gallala in a day and a night of hard riding.

He weighed the risks and dangers, then decided on a dash through the desert to Gallala to take the city by surprise. It would mean, of course, that they would ride straight into battle with the horses exhausted by the long march and with their waterskins empty. However, with numbers and surprise on their side they could seize the fountain-head and the pastures that the Bedouin had described. Once they had those prizes victory was assured.

It took him two more days to disembark all his squadrons, and to assemble the chariots. On the second evening he was ready to begin the forced march on Gallala.

With the waterskins filled, the leading cohorts pulled out of Safaga as soon as the heat went out of the sinking sun. Each of the chariots had two spare teams behind it on lead reins. They would not stop during the night to rest the horses, but would change them as they tired. Any exhausted animals would be turned loose and left behind for the remount herds to bring up.

Trok led the vanguard, and set a killing pace, alternately walking up the inclines, then whipping the horses into a trot or a canter downhill and on level ground. Once the waterskins were empty there was no turning back. By mid-morning the following day the heat had become fierce, and they had used up most of the spare horses.

The Bedouin guides kept assuring Trok that Gallala was not far ahead, but each time they topped a rise the same daunting vista of rock and baked earth shimmered in the heat mirage ahead.

In the late afternoon the Bedouin guides deserted. With the grace of djinns they melted away into the heat mirage, and though Trok sent a brace of chariots after them they were never seen again.

'I warned you,' Ishtar the Mede told Trok smugly. 'You should have listened to my advice. Those godless creatures were probably in the pay of Taita the Warlock. Almost certainly he has masked the road, and led us astray. We do not know how far it is to this mythical Gallala, or for that matter if it really exists.' For this uninvited opinion, Trok lashed him across his tattooed face. This did nothing to alleviate the sense of doom and despondency that threatened to overwhelm Trok. He whipped up the horses once more and took them up the next long, stony incline that faced them. He wondered how many more lay ahead. They were almost at the end of their tether, and he doubted they could keep going through the night.

Somehow they kept struggling onwards, or at least most of his force did. Fifty or sixty chariots burned out their last teams of horses, and Trok left them scattered back along the road.

The sun came up on the second day, warm as a kiss after the chill of the night, but it was a treacherous kiss. Soon it stung and dazzled their bloodshot eyes. For the first time Trok faced the possibility of dying here on this dreadful road to nowhere.

'One more hill,' he called to his last team of horses, and tried to whip them into a trot, but they stumbled up the easy incline with their heads hanging, and the sweat long ago dried to white salt on their flanks. Just below the crest Trok looked back down the straggling column of his army. Even without counting them he saw that he had lost half of his chariots. Hundreds of dismounted troopers were staggering along behind the column, but even as he watched he saw two or three fall and lie beside the track like dead men. There were vultures in the sky following them, hundreds of dark specks turning in high circles against the blue. He saw some slant down to the feast he had prepared for them.

There is only one way,' he told Ishtar, 'and that is forward.' He cracked the whip over the backs of his team, and they went on painfully.

They reached the top of the hill, and Trok gawked in astonishment. The scene in the valley below him was like nothing he had ever imagined. The ruins of the ancient city rose before him. Their outline seemed ghostly but eternal. As he had been promised, the city was surrounded by fields of cool green, and a network of sparkling water canals. His horses smelt the water and strained against the reins with renewed strength.

Even in his desperate haste, Trok took time to assess the tactical situation. He saw at once that the city was helpless and undefended. The gates stood wide open and from them poured the panic-stricken rabble of the escaping populace. Carrying their children and pathetic bundles of possessions they streamed away up the narrow but steep-sided valley to the west of Gallala. A few foot-soldiers mingled with the refugees, but they were obviously in rout and out of hand. There was no sign of cavalry or of fighting chariots. They were a flock of sheep before the wolf pack, but the wolves were parched and weak with thirst.

'Seueth has delivered them into our hands,' Trok shouted with triumph. 'Before the sun sets this day you will have more women and gold than you can use!'

The cry was taken up by the men who followed him over the ridge, and they rode down as fast as their exhausted horses could move to the first irrigation ditch. They spread out along the length of it, the horses sucking up the blessed liquid until their bellies swelled as though in pregnancy. The men threw themselves full-length along the bank, plunging their faces under, or filling their helmets and pouring it over their heads and down their throats.

--

'You should have let me poison the irrigation canals,' Nefer said flatly, as they watched from the other side of the valley.

'You know better than that.' Taita shook his silver head. That would have been an offence that the gods would never forgive. In this bitter land only Seth or Seueth could contemplate such a foul deed.'

'On this day I could play Seth willingly enough.' Nefer smiled bleakly, but he said it merely to provoke the Magus. 'Your two rogues have done well.' He glanced at the two ragged Bedouin who knelt beside Taita. 'Pay them and let them go.'

They place no value on gold,' Taita explained. 'When I lived at Gebel Nagara they brought their children to me, and I cured them of the Yellow Flowers.' He made a sign of blessing over the crouching men and said a few words to them in their dialect, thanking them for risking their lives to mislead Trok, and promising them his future protection. They kissed his feet then slipped away among the boulders.

Taita and Nefer gave their full attention to the unfolding battle in the valley below. Trok's men and horses had drunk until their bellies bulged and now they were mounting. Even though he had lost so many chariots on the approach march, Trok still outnumbered Nefer's forces at least three to one.

'We dare not meet him on open ground,' Nefer mused, and looked down upon the mass of refugees escaping up the valley below them. To begin with there had been very few women in the city - Nefer had deliberately kept their numbers down to eke out the reserves of food for his fighting men - and even they, including Mintaka and Merykara, together with all the children, the sick and wounded, had been evacuated from Gallala two days before. Meren had gone on one of the wagons carrying the contents of the treasury, the gold they had lifted from the false pharaohs. Nefer had sent them all to Gebel Nagara, where Trok would never find them, and the tiny spring of water would just support them until after the battle was decided.

Now Gallala was stripped of everything of value, every chariot, weapon and piece of armour. He gazed down on the refugees with satisfaction. Even from this close it was difficult to tell that they were not women and civilians, but disguised foot-soldiers. Many of these stalwarts were tripping and stumbling in their long skirts and shawls. The bundles they carried in their arms were not swaddled infants, but their bows and swords wrapped in shawls. Their long lances had been cached among the rocks higher up the valley were his main force was concealed.

All Trok's chariots had finished watering and they were coming on across the pastures in tight and ordered formations, wave after wave of fighting vehicles. The water had revived then miraculously, and before them lay the promise of plunder and rapine.

'Pray Horus that we can entice Trok to take up the pursuit and enter the valley,' Nefer whispered. 'If he does not take the bait and seizes the undefended city instead, then he denies us the water and grazing. We would be forced to come to battle on the open ground where he would have every advantage.'

Taita said nothing. He stood with the golden Periapt pressed to his lips and his eyes turned upwards in the attitude the Nefer had come to know so well.

The enemy were close enough now for Nefer to be able to pick out Trok's chariot among the moving mass of vehicles, as it wheeled into a position across the mouth of the valley crowded with the fleeing refugees. Trok was in the centre of the leading rank, ten of his chariots on each of his flanks, on a front wide enough to sweep the valley from side to side. Behind him the rest of his chariots were formed up. The dust settled around them and a terrible silence fell over them. The only sound was the faint babble and hubbub of the fleeing rabble in the gut of the narrow valley ahead of them.

'Come, Trok Uruk!' Nefer whispered. 'Order the charge! Ride into history!'

In the leading chariot in the front rank of the massed forces, Ishtar the Mede crouched beside Trok's massive armoured figure. He was so agitated that he reached up to tug at the ribbons of Trok's beard.

'The smell of the Warlock hangs in the air like the reek of a ten-day-old corpse.' His voice was shrill, and saliva frothed on his lips and flew in a cloud with the force of his emotion. 'He waits for you up there, like a man-eating beast. I can feel his presence. Look up, mighty Pharaoh!'

Trok was distracted enough to glance up at the sky. The vultures had dropped lower.

'Yes! Yes!' Ishtar pressed the small advantage. 'They are Taita's chickens. They wait for him to feed them with your flesh.'

Trok looked back up the valley at the prize that lay before him, but the shadows of the vultures flitted over the earth between them and he hesitated.

Hidden among the boulders on the steep side of the valley Nefer watched him. He was so close now that Nefer fancied that he could read his expression.

'Forward, Trok!' Nefer murmured. 'Sound the charge. Lead your army into the valley.' He could sense doubt in the manner that Trok fiddled with the reins in his hand, and turned his head to look down at the skinny figure of Ishtar beside him.

The Mede's blue-painted face was turned up to him earnestly, and he touched Trok and tugged at his armour with the force of his entreaties. 'It is a snare laid for you by the Warlock. If you never trust me again, you must trust me now. There is death in the air, and the stench of treachery. I can feel Taita's spells like bats' wings beating against my face.'

Trok scratched his beard, and glanced over his shoulder at the ranks of chariots parked wheel to wheel and his troopers leaning forward in cruel anticipation of his order.

'Turn aside, mighty Trok. Seize the city and the water fountain. Nefer Seti and the Warlock will perish out there in the desert, as we so nearly did. That way is certain. The other way is madness.'

On the hillside Nefer narrowed his eyes as he watched his disguised troopers scurrying away up the valley, and he knew that the moment was passing. 'What is holding Trok? Will he not commit to the charge?' Nefer cried aloud. 'If he does not charge now ...'

'Look to the head of the valley.' Taita had not opened his eyes. Even in his agitation Nefer glanced up the valley, and stiffened with alarm. His fist tightened on the hilt of his sword until the knuckles turned white as bone.

'It is not possible!' he growled.

Near the top end of the valley, but fully visible from where Trok's chariots were drawn up, was a slab of rock. Square and ochre-coloured, it stood like a man-made monument beside the road. On top of this, above the stream of fleeing refugees, had appeared a single figure. It was a woman, young and slim, with long dark hair that hung to her waist. Her chiton was the crimson of the royal House of Apepi: it stood out brilliantly, a speck of colour in the bleakness of bare rock and sand.

'Mintaka!' Nefer breathed. 'I ordered her to go with Meren and Merykara to Gebel Nagara.'

'We know that she would never have disobeyed you.' Taita opened his eyes and smiled ironically. Therefore, it seems that she must have misheard you.'

'This is your doing,' Nefer said bitterly. 'You are using her as bait for Trok. You have placed her in mortal danger.'

'Perhaps I can control the khamsin,' Taita said, 'but not even I can control Mintaka Apepi. What she does, she does of her own free will.'

Below them Trok had turned to give the order for his chariots to wheel away, to let the rabble escape, and to seize the fountain and the city of Gallala as Ishtar was urging him. Before he could speak he felt Ishtar stiffen beside him, and heard him whisper, This is something that Taita has conjured.'

Trok jerked around and stared up the long rising valley. He saw the tiny figure in the crimson dress, standing high on the yellow rock platform. He recognized in an instant the object of all his hatred and rage. 'Mintaka Apepi,' he snarled, 'I have come for you, you adulterous little dog-bitch. I will make you plead for death.'

'It is an illusion, Pharaoh. Don't let the Warlock deceive you.'

'That is no illusion,' Trok said grimly. 'I will prove it to you when I bury my prong in her warm flesh, and prod her until she bleeds.'

The Warlock has blinded you,' Ishtar howled. There is death all around us.'

He tried to leap down from the footplate and run, but Trok seized him by his lacquered locks and hauled him back. 'Nay, stay with me, Ishtar the Mede. I will let you have a taste of her sweet crevice before I throw her to my bully-boys to finish off.' He raised his clenched fist high above his head and shouted, 'Forward! March!'

The chariots on either hand rolled forward together, and the ranks behind followed Trok into the valley, the sun sparkling on the javelin heads and the dust rose around them like smoke. The tail of the fleeing refugees was three hundred paces ahead when Trok gave his next order.

'Forward at the gallop! Charge!'

The horses leaped away, and in a rising thunder of hoofs and wheels they swept up the narrow valley.

Trok has committed,' Nefer said softly. 'But at what cost? If he takes Mintaka ...' He could not bring himself to go on, but he stared in anguish at her tall lithe figure standing serenely in the path of the storm.

'Now you have something to fight for,' Taita said gently.

Nefer felt all his love and deadly concern for Mintaka become battle rage, but it was a cold hard rage that sharpened every one of his senses and filled his being to the exclusion of all else.

As the phalanx of chariots swept by below where he stood on the side of the valley, he stepped out from behind the rock that had concealed him. The complete attention of Trok and his troopers was fixed on the helpless victims ahead of their racing chariots. They had no eyes for the tall figure that appeared suddenly high on their flank. But all Nefer's men could see him clearly. They were hidden among the boulders down both slopes of the valley. Nefer raised his sword above his head, and as the last chariot sped past he brought it down sharply.

The wagons were poised on the steep gradient, with their wheels chocked and lashed to hold them. They were screened from view with dried grass the exact colour of their surroundings, and they were so heavily laden with rocks that the axles sagged. At Nefer's signal his wagoners pulled out the wooden chocks and slashed away the lashings that held the wheels. From both sides of the valley the wagons rolled forward, gathering speed, bounding down on top of the massed chariots below.

When Ishtar screamed at his side, Trok tore his eyes from the Mintaka's figure at the far end of the valley, and he saw the huge vehicles tearing down upon his squadrons. 'Back!' he shouted. 'Break away!' But even his bull voice was lost in the uproar. The charge once launched could not be stopped, and there was no space to manoeuvre in the narrow floor of the valley.

The first wagons crashed into the head of the charge. There was the rending of wood, the screams of crushed men and horses, the thunder of wagons overturning and capsizing, shedding their loads of rock.

Suddenly the way ahead of Trok was blocked by one of the cumbersome carts, and his horses swerved into the chariot running beside him. In an instant the magnificent charge was transformed into a shambles of shattered and overturned vehicles, and crippled horses.

The wagons had sealed off the valley at both ends. Even the chariots that had not been smashed and capsized were now bottled up in a struggling mass. The whole purpose of the chariot, its strength and threat, was its ability to run and turn, to charge and pull back at speed. Now they were immobilized, held by walls of stone, and Nefer's archers were on the slopes above them. The first volleys decimated the unprotected charioteers. Within minutes the valley was transformed into a slaughterhouse.

Some of Trok's men jumped down from their trapped vehicles and charged up the sides of the valley on foot. But they were exhausted by the gruelling approach march, and burdened with their armour. The ground was steep and rugged and they moved only slowly. From the cover of the boulders and walls of hastily erected stone zarebas, Nefer's men met them with long lances and hails of javelins. Most were cut down before they had reached the first rank of defenders.

Trok looked around him wildly, seeking some way out of the trap, but one of his horses was dead, crushed by the spilled load of rocks from the wagon that blocked his way forward. Behind him the other vehicles were so crowded that there was no room for him to turn or back up. Arrows and javelins were singing around him, clattering against the sides of the chariot, clanging off his helmet and breastplate.

Before Trok could restrain him, Ishtar took advantage of the confusion to spring down from the footplate and scuttle away between the wrecked chariots and plunging, shrilling horses. Then Trok looked ahead again, and incredulously he saw Mintaka still standing unmoved on the top of the ochre rock pile just ahead of him. She was staring at him with a cold look of revulsion on her lovely face that turned his rage to madness.

He snatched up his war bow from the rack at his side and reached for an arrow from the quiver, but then he changed his mind, threw the weapon aside and shouted at her over the heads of his rearing and plunging horses. 'No! An arrow is too good for a bitch in heat. I am coming to get you with my bare hands, I want to feel you struggling as I squeeze the last breath out of you, you filthy little harlot.'

He drew his sword and sprang down to the ground. He ran forward under the hoofs of his rearing horse, and scrambled over the overturned body of the wagon. Two of Nefer's men jumped out from behind the rocks to oppose him but he hacked them down and ran over their twitching corpses. His eyes were fastened hungrily on the girl in the crimson dress standing tall and proud ahead of him, the flame to the moth.

Nefer saw Trok break out of the trap, and he ran down the slope, springing from rock to rock. 'Run, Mintaka! Get away from him,' he shouted urgently, but either she did not hear him or she would not listen.

Trok did hear him, and he stopped and looked up. 'Come on, then, my pretty boy, I have enough blade for both you and your whore.'

Without breaking his run, Nefer hurled the javelin in his hand, but Trok caught it neatly in the centre of the light targe he carried on his shoulder, and the weapon spun away, clattering on the rock, and landed at Mintaka's feet. She ignored it.

The throw had been enough to divert Trok for the moment, and Nefer sprang down on to the level ground in front of him. Trok went on guard as Nefer confronted him and then his face twisted into a ferocious grin. He crouched behind the bronze shield and waved the sword in his right hand. 'Come, puppy,' he said. 'Let us test your claim to the double crown.'

Nefer used the impetus of his run down the slope and came at him without a pause. Trok caught the first blow on the circle of bronze. Nefer jumped back just as Trok cut at him over the top of the targe. Nefer closed in again, trading thrust for cut.

Nefer's men had seen him charge down the hillside. They followed his example, left the cover of the rocks and came bounding down in waves. Within seconds the full length of the valley was choked from side to side with struggling, hacking, thrusting men.

Nefer feinted at Trok's hip, aiming at the joint of his armour. When Trok covered, he swung backhanded at his face. Trok was surprised by the change of direction and by the speed of the stroke. Though he jerked his head back the point of Nefer's blade split his cheek open and the blood gushed into his beard. The wound galvanized him, and Trok roared and rushed at Nefer. He swung blows from every angle with such rapidity that his sword seemed to form an impenetrable wall of shining bronze around him. Nefer was forced to fall back before the attack until he felt the stone slab on which Mintaka stood pressing into his back.

He could no longer retreat or manoeuvre, and he was forced to pit himself against all Trok's bull-like strength, and trade him blow for blow. In a contest of this nature, there were few men who could stand against Trok, who never seemed to flag, and he laughed as Nefer managed to turn some of his blows. 'Let us see how long you can stem the tide, boy. I can go on like this all day, can you?' he asked, without missing a stroke. Metal clanged and rang on metal, while Trok moved gradually to the right blocking the only way that Nefer might slip out of his clutches.

Trok's strength was like some malignant force of nature. Nefer felt that he was caught in a great storm wind, as helpless as if he were carried away on a rip-tide of the ocean. As much as the years of battle training had hardened him, they had not prepared him for this. He felt his right arm tiring and slowing as he tried to match Trok.

Trok nicked the side of his neck, and then seconds later sliced open his leather corselet and scored him along the ribs. Nefer knew that his only chance of surviving the storm was to trade his speed and agility against Trok's brute strength, but he was pinned against the rock. He had to break away.

He caught the next cut high on his blade and deflected it just sufficiently to make an opening through which he could escape, but as he leaped into it he exposed his left flank. Trok recovered and drove in a low thrust that laid open his thigh just above the tattooed cartouche. The blood ran down into his sandal and squelched at every pace he took.

The last of Nefer's strength was ebbing away, and Trok swept up his blade and locked it with his own, forcing his guard higher and higher. Nefer knew that if he attempted to break away he would expose his chest for the killing thrust. Yet the cut in his thigh had weakened and slowed him still further. The grin on Trok's face was triumphant. 'Courage, boy! It is nearly over. Then you can rest - for ever,' he gloated.

Nefer heard Mintaka shout something, but it made no sense, and he could not afford the distraction. Gradually Trok forced aside his blade and towered over him, so they came chest to chest, then suddenly he shifted his weight to the left, towards Nefer's wounded leg. Nefer tried to counter, but his leg gave way under him. Trok hooked his foot behind Nefer's heel and threw him over backwards.

The sword flew from Nefer's weakened grip, and as he sprawled on the sunbaked earth, Trok lifted his blade above his head with both hands for the killing stroke. He was poised like that when suddenly his expression changed to one of surprise and bewilderment. Without completing the blow he reached up behind his own neck with one hand. He brought the hand back and held it before his face. It was wet with his blood. He opened his mouth to say something, but a double stream of bright blood trickled from the corners of his mouth and he turned slowly away from Nefer. Trok stared up at Mintaka who stood on the pinnacle of the rock above him. With a detached feeling of disbelief, Nefer saw the shaft of the javelin sticking out of the back of Trok's neck.

As she saw Nefer go down, Mintaka had snatched up the javelin that lay at her feet, the weapon that Nefer had thrown at the start of the engagement. She hurled it at Trok's back. The point took Trok beneath the rim of his bronze helmet and went in deeply, just missing the spinal column, but opening the carotid artery.

Standing like a gargoyle with his mouth wide open, blood spewing out in a fountain, Trok dropped his sword and reached up. He seized Mintaka around the waist and dragged her screaming from her perch above him. He was trying to say something, but the sheets of blood pouring from his mouth drowned his voice.

Mintaka screamed as he crushed her to his chest, and Nefer scrambled to his feet. He picked up Trok's sword from where he had dropped it, and limped up behind him.

Mintaka's cries had given renewed strength to his sword arm. He sent his first thrust through the lacings of Trok's corselet, deeply into his back. Trok stiffened, and dropped Mintaka. She scrambled away, and Nefer pulled out the blade and stabbed again. Swaying on his feet, Trok turned slowly to face him. He took a step towards Nefer, reaching out for him with bloody mailed hands. Nefer stabbed him in the throat, and Trok dropped to his knees, clutching at the blade. Nefer pulled it away, slicing deeply into Trok's fingers and palms, severing the sinews and nerves.

Trok toppled forward on his face, and Nefer stabbed him through the lacing, between his shoulder-blades to his heart. He left the blade in him, and turned to Mintaka who crouched in the shelter of the rock. She flew to him, and clung to him with all her strength. Now that the danger was past, Mintaka lost all her icy control and she was sobbing, barely coherently, 'I thought he was going to kill you, my love.'

'He almost did, but for you,' Nefer gasped. 'I owe you a life.'

'It was terrible.' Mintaka's voice quavered. 'I thought he would never die.'

'He was a god.' Nefer tried to laugh but it came out wrongly. 'They take a little killing.'

He became aware that the sounds of battle from further down the valley had changed. With his arm still around her, he turned to look back. Trok's men had seen their pharaoh cut down, and the fight had gone out of them. They were throwing down their weapons, and wailing, 'Enough! Enough! We yield. All praise to Pharaoh Nefer Seti, the one true king.'

With the realization of victory, Nefer felt the last vestiges of strength flow out of his battered and bleeding body. He had just enough left to raise his voice, and shout, 'Give them quarter. They are our brother Egyptians. Give them quarter!'

As Nefer slumped down, Taita materialized at his side and helped Mintaka lower him to the ground. While the two of them dressed his wounds, and staunched the bleeding from the deep cut in his thigh, his officers came to report to Nefer.

Nefer discounted his own injuries as he demanded to know who had survived the battle and who had been wounded and killed. With joy, and thanks to Horus and the Red God, Nefer saw that his trusted captains, Hilto, Shabako and Socco, were among the men who crowded around him, exulting in the victory, proud of themselves and their men, filled with joy to see him alive.

They made a litter of lances and carried him back down the valley to Gallala, but it was a long journey for Trok's captured officers, and men crowded the roadside, kneeling unarmed and bare-headed to plead for his mercy, shouting repentance and remorse that they had ever taken up arms against the true Pharaoh.

Three times before they reached the gates of the city, Nefer signalled for his litter to be lowered and allowed the captured centurions and captains to come forward and kiss his feet. 'I spare you from the traitor's death you so richly deserve,' he told them sternly, 'but you are all reduced to the rank of sergeants of the Blue, and you must prove once more your duty and loyalty to the House of Tamose.'

They praised him for his mercy, but Nefer frowned and shook his head when they addressed him as a god. 'I am not one of the pantheon, as the blasphemers Trok and Naja claim they are.' But they would not be dissuaded, and renewed their praises and entreaties, and his own men led by his brother warriors of the Red Road, joined their voices to those of the defeated, begging him to declare his divinity.

To distract them Nefer issued his orders with a frowning mien. 'The corpse of Trok Uruk, the false claimant to the double crown of this very Egypt, shall be burned without ceremony, here upon the battlefield so, that his soul shall wander through all eternity seeking but never finding a home.'

They murmured with awe for this was the most dreadful punishment that could be devised.

The other enemy dead are to be treated with all respect, and allowed embalmment and a decent burial. The name of Trok Uruk shall be erased from every monument and building in the land, and the temple that he erected to himself in Avaris shall in his stead be dedicated to the winged Horus in memory of the victory that he gave us this day before the city of Gallala.'

They shouted their approbation at this decree, and Nefer went on, 'All the possessions of Trok Uruk, all his treasure and estates, his slaves and buildings, his warehouses and goods of whatsoever nature shall be forfeited to the state. Send water wagons back along the road to Safaga, with grooms and surgeons to bring in all the horses, chariots and men that Trok Uruk left along the way during his arrogant march on our capital here in Gallala. If they repudiate the false pharaohs and swear allegiance to the House of Tamose the prisoners shall be pardoned and recruited into our armies.'

By the time Nefer had given his last order, and issued his last decree for that day, his voice was hoarse, he was pale and almost exhausted. As they carried him through the city gates he asked Mintaka quietly, 'Where is Taita? Has anybody seen the Magus?' But Taita had disappeared.

--

Taita watched from the hillside above the battlefield as the jaws of the trap closed on Trok's army and his chariots were smashed by the rock-filled wagons, the arrows and the javelins falling like nights of locusts upon the survivors, when a single bizarre figure caught his eye in the chaos.

Ishtar the Mede scampered between the rocks. Like a running hare he disappeared from sight only to reappear further up the slope, ducking and dodging. By some chance or magical charm he avoided the arrows and javelins of Nefer's troops and at last dived over the crest and disappeared from sight.

Taita let him go. There would be time for him later. He watched the climax of the battle, extending all his powers to act as a shield over Nefer during his single combat with Trok at the base of the rock. Even at this distance he managed to deflect many of Trok's blows that should have been fatal, and when Trok went for the final thrust into Nefer's thigh his blade might have found the great femoral artery if Taita had not used all his influence to turn the point aside.

Since that time long ago when Taita had saved Mintaka from harm during the encounter with the cobra of the goddess, she had become a subject who responded readily to his influence. She had the intelligence and imagination that opened her mind to him. It was impossible to influence a fool. He had summoned her back to Gallala to show herself to Trok at the head of the valley, and to lure him into the trap. Then, when she had stood frozen with horror on the rock above the fighting pair, Taita had bent her to his will once again and put into her mind the impulse to reach down for the javelin that lay at her feet. He had bolstered her right arm as she steadied her aim and threw. Then, as the life went out of Trok, he had rushed down the slope to minister to Nefer and to bind up the wound that had cut so perilously close to the pulsing artery in his thigh.

When his brother warriors of the Red Road lifted the young pharaoh on to the litter of spears, Taita with his duty done for the present drifted away into the throng. Nobody paid him any heed as he went.

He picked up the tracks that Ishtar had left as he escaped out of the narrow valley and followed them until they were impossible to discern on the earth on the top of the hills, which was baked hard as mosaic tiles by the sun.

Taita stopped and crouched down. From his pouch he took out a sliver of dried root and slipped it into his mouth. As he chewed on it, he opened his mind and reached out to detect the Mede's aura, the trace he had left as he passed. As the root sharpened his senses Taita saw the aura in the corner of his vision. It was a shadow, dirty grey and ephemeral, that vanished when he looked directly at it. Each person had his own aura. Nefer Seti, on account of his noble and divine inner being, threw a rosy essence that to Taita was readily detectable. Taita had followed that faint rosy emanation to find Nefer after he had been mauled by the lion and he and Mintaka were lost in the desert beyond Dabba.

Ishtar the Mede's aura was dark and tainted. Taita stood up and went on again after it, striding out on his long legs with his staff tapping on the stones. Every so often he saw physical confirmation that he was on the right track, by a smudged footprint in a softer patch of earth or by a recently dislodged pebble.

Ishtar had circled round to the south then come back towards Gallala. Taita was alarmed and lengthened his stride. If Ishtar was trying to get close to Nefer again to work some mischief, Taita must intercept him. However, the pursuit led him to one of the chariots Trok had abandoned on his march up from the coast. From the wreck Ishtar had salvaged something, and Taita closed his eyes and worked out what it was.

'A waterskin,' he murmured, and Taita saw where he had scraped away the earth to drag the skin out from under the side of the capsized chariot. Another dry and empty skin was still hanging there. Ishtar had left it, probably because he knew he could carry the weight of only one full skin. Taita picked up the empty skin and slung it over his shoulder. He left the chariot, with the dead horses in the traces already beginning to stink, and followed Ishtar onwards.

Carrying the waterskin with him, Ishtar had gone back towards Gallala. When he topped the ridge above the city he had crept down to the bank of the closest irrigation canal. The imprint of his knees was clear in the wet clay where he had knelt to drink and then to fill the skin he carried. Taita drank himself. After that he filled his own waterskin. Then he rose and followed the traces Ishtar had left as he started back eastwards along the road towards Safaga and the coast. Taita strode after him.

Night fell and Taita kept on. Sometimes the aura of the Mede faded away completely, but Taita followed the road. At other times it grew stronger, until Taita smelt it, a faint, musty, unpleasant odour. When it was this strong he could fathom the essence of the Mede. He could detect his vindictive and vengeful nature. He divined that Ishtar was frightened and demoralized by the turn that the fates had taken against him, but his powers were still formidable. He constituted a great and real danger, not only to Nefer and Mintaka but to Taita himself. If he were allowed to escape and regenerate his scattered powers, he might threaten the future of the House of Tamose and Apepi. Ishtar was one of the higher adepts, an evil one, which made him all the more dangerous. He could certainly overlook his selected victims, and conjure up all manner of profanities to bring down disaster on Nefer and Mintaka. He could sicken and sour their love for each other, bring down suffering, miscarriage and plague, pains and disease with no focus or reason, mental aberrations, madness and eventually death.

Even Taita was not immune to his baleful spirit. If he were allowed to escape, Ishtar might gradually erode Taita's powers and frustrate his work. Unless Taita acted now, while he had the opportunity, to destroy him utterly.

The gibbous moon rose over the stark hills and lit Taita's way. He was in that long swinging stride with which he could cover the ground as swiftly as a mounted man. He could sense that ahead of him Ishtar was unaware that he was being followed and his pace was much slower. Every hour that passed Taita felt his aura stronger and nearer. I will be up to him before sunrise, he thought, and at that moment he doubled over and vomited in a projectile stream on to the stony track. Overwhelmed with a sudden, terrible nausea, Taita almost collapsed but regained his balance, and staggered back, wiping the bitter taste of bile from his mouth.

'Careless!' he rebuked himself angrily. 'So close to the quarry I should have taken greater care. The Mede has detected me.'

He drank a little water from the skin, then went forward cautiously. He pointed his staff ahead and swung it slowly from side to side. Suddenly it grew heavy in his hand. He followed that direction and saw ahead of him, glinting in the moonlight, the circle of pale pebbles laid out on the side of the track.

'A gift from the Mede,' he said aloud.

Nausea seized him once more, but he choked it back, struck the earth with the staff and spoke one of the words of power.

'Ncube!' His nausea receded, and he could approach the circle closer.

It is not enough that I should break his spell, he thought grimly. I must turn it back upon the Mede.

He used the tip of his staff to move one of the pebbles out of the circle, disrupting its power. Now he could squat beside the pattern without experiencing any harm. Without touching any of the pebbles he leaned close and sniffed at them. The smell of the Mede was strong upon them and he smiled with cold satisfaction.

'He touched them with his bare hands,' Taita whispered. Ishtar had left traces of his sweat on them. Taita could use that faint effluent. Careful not to make the same mistake, he moved the pebbles with the tip of his staff, forming them into a different pattern, an arrowhead pointing in the direction that Ishtar had taken. He took a mouthful of water from the skin and spat it on the pebbles, which shone wetly in the moonlight. Then he pointed his staff like a javelin along the same line as the arrowhead of pebbles.

'Kydash!' he shouted, and felt pressure build up in his eardrums as though he had plunged deeply below the surface of the ocean. Before it became unbearable, it began slowly to abate, and he felt a sense of well-being and pleasure. It was done. He had turned it back upon the Mede.

--

A league ahead Ishtar the Mede was hurrying along the track. He was by now fully aware of the pursuit. He was confident that the barrier he had placed across the track would stop most men, but he knew it would not long deter the one he feared most.

Suddenly he staggered in mid-stride and clutched his ears with both hands. The pain was blinding, as though a red hot dagger had been thrust deep into each of his eardrums. He groaned and dropped to his knees. 'It is the Warlock.' He sobbed. The pain was so intense that he could not think clearly. 'He has turned it back on me.'

With shaking hands he reached into the pouch on his belt and brought out his most potent talisman, the dry embalmed hand of one of Pharaoh Tamose's infants who had died soon after birth during the plague of the Yellow Flowers. Ishtar had robbed the little prince's tomb to obtain it. The hand was dark and clawed like a monkey's paw.

He held it to his pounding head, and felt the pain start to abate. He came unsteadily to his feet, and broke into a shuffling dance, chanting and wailing. The pain in his ears cleared. He gave one final leap in the air and stood facing back along the way he had come. He could feel the presence of the Warlock close, like the threat of thunder on a close summer's day.

He thought of laying another snare, but knew that Taita would send it back to him. I must turn aside and conceal my path, he decided. He ran on along the road seeking the place where he could turn. He found where the track crossed an intrusion of grey schist, so hard that even the passing of Trok's legions had left no mark upon it.

With his left forefinger he traced out lightly the sacred symbol of Marduk on the rock, spat on it and uttered the three hidden names of the god that would summon him.

'Hide me from my enemies, mighty Marduk. Bring me safely back to your temple in Babylon, and I will make for you the sacrifice you love so well,' he promised. Best of all Marduk loved little girls sent into his furnace.

Ishtar stood on one leg and hopped backwards five and fifty paces, the esoteric number of Marduk known only to the adepts. Then he turned sharply off the road and set out at right angles to it, heading into the northern wilderness. He went swiftly, trying to open the distance between him and the man who pursued him.

--

Taita reached the point where the ridge of grey schist crossed the road, and stopped abruptly. The aura that had been so strong only moments before had disappeared like mist in the warmth of the rising sun. There was neither taste nor smell nor a glimpse of the Mede remaining. He went on down the road a short way, but found that the trail was dead and cold. Quickly he retraced his steps until he reached the point where he had lost it. Ishtar would not have wasted his time with a simple spell of concealment. He knows that the Ashes or the Water and Blood would hardly give me pause, he thought.

He looked up at the sky, and from the starry firmament picked out the single red star low on the horizon, the star of the goddess Lostris. He held up her Periapt and began to chant the Praise to the Goddess. He had barely completed the first stanza when he felt an angry, alien presence. Another god had been invoked on this spot, and knowing Ishtar he could guess well enough who that was. He started on the second stanza of praise and on the bare rock ahead of him appeared a glow, like that of the copper walls of the furnace in the temple of Marduk when the sacrificial fires were burning.

Marduk is affronted, and shows his anger, he thought, with satisfaction. He went to stand over the faintly glowing spot and intoned. 'You are far from your own land and your temple, Marduk of the furnace. Few worship you in this very Egypt. Your powers are dissipated. I invoke the name of the goddess Lostris, and you cannot stand against it.'

He lifted the skirt of his chiton. 'I quench your fires, Marduk,' he said, and squatting like a woman, he urinated on the rock. It sizzled and steamed like a bar of metal from the forge of the coppersmith drenched in the trough. 'In the name of the goddess Lostris, Marduk the Devourer, stand aside and let me pass.'

The rock cooled quickly, and as the steam dispersed he could make out once more the shadowy traces of the Mede beyond as they turned off the track towards the north. The veil that Ishtar had laid was pierced and torn. Taita stepped through it and set off again after him.

The horizon paled and the light increased to a golden radiance in the east. Taita knew that he was gaining steadily, and he strained his eyes ahead in the gathering light for the first glimpse of his quarry. Instead he came to an abrupt halt. At his feet gaped a terrible abyss, whose sheer sides dropped into darkness far below. No man could scale those depths, and there was no way around this obstacle.

Taita looked across at the far side. It was at the very least a thousand paces across, and the precipice was even more daunting when seen from this angle. There were vultures soaring over the bottomless gulf. One of the grotesque birds circled in to alight on its shaggy nest of sticks and twigs built on a ledge high in the opposite cliff face.

Taita shook his head with admiration. 'Wonderful, Ishtar!' he murmured. 'Even the vultures. That was a masterful touch. I could not have improved upon it, but such an effort called for a great expenditure of strength. It must have cost you dearly.'

Taita stepped out over the edge of the cliff, and instead of plunging down into airy space, there was firm ground under his feet. The vista of cliffs and gorges, even the circling vultures, wavered and broke up as a mirage does when you walk towards it.

The abyss was gone and in its place was a gentle plain of stony ground, with low hills still blue with shadows at the far end. In the middle of this plain, not five hundred paces away, stood Ishtar the Mede. He was facing Taita with both arms held above his head, trying desperately to preserve the illusion that he had created. When he saw that he had failed and that Taita was striding towards him like an avenging djinn, he dropped his arms with a hopeless, resigned gesture and turned towards the limestone hills at the far end of the stony plain. He broke into a shambling run, his black robes swirling around his legs.

Taita followed him with his long indefatigable strides, and when Ishtar looked back there was desperation on his blue-whorled face. For a moment he stared in terror at the tall silver-haired figure, then he turned and ran faster. For a while he pulled away, opening the gap, then his run faltered, and Taita gained upon him inexorably.

Ishtar dropped the waterskin from his shoulder, and ran with a lighter step, but he was only a few hundred paces ahead of Taita when he reached the low hills that were grey blue with limestone outcrops in the early light. He disappeared into one of the gullies.

When Taita reached the mouth of the gully he saw Ishtar's footprints strung along the sandy floor ahead of him, but they disappeared round the corner where the gully turned sharply to the right. Taita followed him, but as he reached the corner of pale limestone pillars, he heard the thunderous grunting and roaring of a wild beast. As he stepped round he saw that the gully narrowed ahead of him, and standing foursquare in the way, its tail lashing from side to side, was a huge male lion.

The lion's black mane was erect, a great bush that shook like grass in a high wind at each roar that erupted from the gaping jaws. Its eyes were golden and the pupils were implacable black slits. The rank, bestial scent of the animal was thick in the hot air, the stench of the rotting carcasses on which it had feasted with those long yellow fangs.

Taita looked down at the sandy earth on which the massive paws were planted with all the claws unsheathed. He could still see Ishtar's footprints in the sand, but the paws of the lion had left no mark.

Taita never broke his stride. He raised the Periapt on its chain, and walked straight at the slavering animal. Instead of rising in pitch the roaring became muted, the outline of its head turned transparent so that he could see the rock walls of the gully through it. Then, like river mist, the animal faded and was gone.

Taita walked through the space where it had stood and rounded the corner. Ahead of him the gully became narrower still and the sides were steeper. It ended abruptly against a wall of rock.

Ishtar stood with his back against the rock, staring at Taita with mad eyes. The whites were yellowed and bloodshot, the pupils black and dilated. The smell of his terror was more rank than the odour of the phantom lion had been. He raised his right hand and pointed a long bony finger at Taita. 'Back, Warlock!' he screamed. 'I warn you!'

Taita walked towards him and he screamed again, this time in a guttural language, and made the gesture of hurling some unseen missile at Taita's head. Quickly Taita held the Periapt of Lostris before his eyes, and felt something fly close past his head, with the sound of a flighting arrow.

Ishtar turned and bolted into a narrow opening in the rock wall behind him, that had been screened from Taita by his body. Taita paused before the entrance, and tapped the stony portals with his staff. The rock rang true, and he heard Ishtar's blundering footsteps echoing out of the dark entrance. Taita was almost certain that this was no illusion, but the real entrance to a cavern in the limestone cliff.

Taita stepped through after him, and found that he was in a low, rocky passage, dimly lit by the sunlight through the entrance behind him. The floor of the cave sloped away in front of him, and he went on, stepping more cautiously. Now he was certain that the passage was real in time and dimension, not something conjured up by the Mede to thwart him and turn him aside.

He could hear the echoes of Ishtar's footsteps, distorted and magnified in the tunnel ahead. Taita counted his paces as he went forward into darkness. After a hundred and twenty the light strengthened again, a strong emanation from some source deeper in the hillside.

Suddenly the tunnel took a sharp bend, and as he stepped round it Taita found himself in a large cavern with a high roof. In the centre of the roof was an aperture which must lead to the outside world and open air for a beam of bright sunlight fell from it to the floor of the cavern.

From the floor rose sharp-pointed stalagmites, the crystals glimmering like the fangs of a man-eating shark. From the high roof hung down matching stalactites, some shaped like spearheads and others like the shining wings of the gods.

Across the cavern Ishtar crouched against the far wall. There was no escape that way. When he saw Taita appear in the mouth of the tunnel he began to shriek and blubber. 'Mercy, mighty Magus! There is a bond between us. We are brothers. Spare me and I will show you such mysteries as even you have never dreamed of. I will place all my powers at your disposal. I will be your faithful dog. I will devote my life to your service.'

So abject were his entreaties and his promises that, despite himself, Taita felt his resolve waver. It was just the mere flicker of doubt in his mind, but Ishtar picked up the tiny chink in his armour, and exploited it instantly. He flung out one hand with the thumb and forefinger forming a circle, the sign of Marduk, and shouted something in that strange guttural tongue.

From behind him Taita felt an insupportable physical weight bear down upon his shoulder, and something like the invisible tentacles of a giant octopus envelop his body, trapping his arms to his sides, wrapping around his throat in a strangler's grip. He smelt scorching human flesh, the aura of the Devourer, suffocating him. He could not move.

On the far side of the cavern Ishtar danced and capered, his tattooed face contorted in a grotesque mask, his tongue sticking out between his blue lips and lapping at the air like that of a cat. He lifted his skirts and thrust his hips out at Taita. His penis was in full erection, the skin peeled back from the swollen purple head like an obscene fruit. 'Your frail goddess cannot protect you here deep in the earth, Taita. You can no longer prevail against Marduk the Devourer and Ishtar, his minion,' he shrieked. 'Our contest is over. I have defeated you and all your wiles, Warlock! Now you will die.'

Taita turned his eyes up towards the high dim roof of the cavern and fixed all his attention on one of the long gleaming stalactites that hung down from it like a great shimmering dagger. He gathered all his reserves, lifted the staff in his right hand and pointed it upwards. With the last breath in his lungs he shouted, 'Kydash!' the word of power.

There was a crack like the ice shattering in the depths of a glacier, the stalactite broke from the roof and plunged downwards. Driven by its own immense weight, the point struck Ishtar on the top of his shoulder, close to its juncture with his neck. It transfixed him through chest and belly and tore out through his anus. The long stone spike pegged him down on the cavern floor like a gutted fish on the drying rack.

As Ishtar twitched and shuddered and kicked convulsively in his death throes, Taita felt the weight lifted from his shoulders and the pressure on his throat relax. Marduk had retreated and Taita could breathe again. The smell of burnt flesh was gone. The air was ancient and sterile once again, cool and tainted only with the faint odour of fungus.

He picked up his staff, turned and walked back along the tunnel into the open air and the sunlight. At the entrance he turned back and with his staff struck the limestone portals of the tunnel, once, twice, three times.

Deep in the earth there was a rumble of collapsing rock, and a gust of air and dust blew from the tunnel mouth as, deep in the earth, the roof of the cavern caved in.

'With the stone spike driven through your heart, not even your foul god can free you from your tomb. Lie in it through all eternity, Ishtar the Mede,' Taita said, and turned away. With his staff tapping on the stones, he struck out along the road back to Gallala.

--

The three messengers reached Babylon in the spring when the snows were still thick upon the distant mountain-tops in the north where the two great rivers rise.

Pharaoh Naja Kiafan gave them audience on the uppermost terrace garden of the palace of Babylon. Queen Heseret sat beside his throne. She wore the most magnificent jewels that the treasury of King Sargon had yielded. Her high-piled dark hair was covered by a silken net on which gemstones sparkled like all the stars of the firmament. Her arms were laden with bracelets and her fingers with rings so heavy with emeralds and rubies and sapphires that she could barely lift them. Around her throat was a stone the size of an unripe fig, as clear as water from a mountain spring and so adamantine that it could cut through glass or obsidian. This marvellous gem came from the land beyond the Indus river, and when the sun caught it, the shafts of light it threw out pained the eye.

The messengers were all high officers from the army that Pharaoh Trok had taken westward four months before. They came in great fear of their lives, for they bore evil tidings. They had ridden so far and so fast that they were thin and burned dark by the suns of the desert and the high mountains. They threw themselves at the foot of the throne on which Naja sat in glory and splendour to overshadow even that of his wife. 'All hail to you, Pharaoh Naja, mightiest of the gods of Egypt,' they greeted him. 'We are bearers of terrible tidings. Have mercy upon us. Though what we have to tell you will displease you, be merciful and turn away your wrath from us.'

'Speak!' Naja commanded sternly. 'I alone shall judge if you are to be spared.'

'The news we bring is of Pharaoh Trok Uruk, your brother god and the co-ruler of Egypt,' said the officer who was a Commander of the Vanguard, bore the rank of Best of Ten Thousand and wore the Gold of Valour upon his chest.

'Speak!' Naja ordered again, for the man had faltered.

'In the desert that surrounds the ancient city of Gallala there took place a mighty battle between the armies of Pharaoh Trok Uruk and those of the usurper Nefer Seti.' He fell silent again.

'Continue!' Naja rose to his feet, and pointed the royal flail at the man's face, a gesture that threatened torture and death.

The messenger went on hurriedly, 'By the means of cowardly deceit and wicked witchcraft the army of your brother and our Pharaoh Trok Uruk was lured to destruction. He is slain and his army decimated. Those of his men who survived have gone over to the enemy, and have rallied to the standard of the false pharaoh Nefer Seti, may Seth visit him with a terrible vengeance and eradicate his name and all his works. This same wicked usurper with all his force marches on Avaris and both kingdoms of this very Egypt!'

Naja sank back on his throne and stared at him in astonishment. At his side Heseret smiled. When she did so, the cruel lines at the corners of her mouth vanished and she was transformed, becoming once more ineffably beautiful. She touched Naja's arm with a bejewelled finger, and when he leaned towards her she whispered in his ear, 'Praise to the gods, and all hail to the one and only Pharaoh of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms, the mighty Naja Kiafan!'

Naja tried to remain stern and expressionless but a tiny smile played for an instant over his lean and handsome features. It took him a moment to suppress it then he rose again. His voice was sibilant and soft, but menacing as the sound of a sword blade being swiped across the face of the whetstone. 'You bring the news of the death of a pharaoh and a god. Woe upon you for you are now contaminated and steeped in misery and misfortune.' He made a gesture to his bodyguard who stood around the throne. Take them away and give them over to the priests of the god Marduk that they be sacrificed in the furnace to appease the wrath of the god.'

When they were bound and led away to the sacrifice, Naja stood again and announced, 'The god and Pharaoh Trok Uruk is dead. We commend his soul to the gods. I declare before you all that there is now only one ruler over both kingdoms, and over all the territories and all the conquered lands and possessions of Egypt. I declare further that ruler to be myself, Pharaoh Naja Kiafan.'

'Bak-her!' cried all the courtiers and captains, who stood around his throne, and they drew their swords and beat them on their shields. 'Bak-her! Exalted be the king-god Naja Kiafan!'

'Send word to all my commanders and the generals of all my armies. We will meet in war council at the noon hour this same day.'

For eleven days that followed, from dawn to dusk, Pharaoh Naja sat at the head of his council in the throne room of the palace of Sargon. With sentries at the doors to bar interlopers or spies they drew up their plans and their order of battle. On the twelfth day Naja commanded the muster of his armies in Mesopotamia, and sent ambassadors to the subservient kings and satraps in all the conquered territories between Babylon and the borders of Egypt. He ordered them to prepare all their forces for war, and place themselves under his command for the campaign against Nefer Seti.

In the full of the following moon, when the army mustered before the Blue Gate of the city of Babylon they were forty thousand strong, all veteran and blooded troops, well equipped with horse and chariot, bow and sword.

Heseret stood with her husband, the one and only true Pharaoh of Egypt, on the ramparts of the city to review the array.

'What a glorious sight,' she told him. 'Surely there was never such a muster as this in all the annals of war.'

'As we march westwards, back towards the motherland, our numbers will be swollen by the Sumerians and the Hittites, the Hurrians and all the armies of the conquered lands through which we pass. We will return to Egypt with two thousand chariots. The puppy dare not stand against us.' He looked down at her. 'Do you feel no pity for your brother Nefer?'

'None!' She shook her head so her jewellery glinted and sparkled in the sunlight. 'You are my pharaoh and my husband. Whosoever rises against you is a traitor, and deserves death.'

'Death he shall have, and the treacherous Warlock will share his funeral pyre and burn beside him,' Naja promised grimly.

--

They smelt the river from afar, the perfume of the sweet cool waters on the desert air. The horses lifted their heads and whickered. The infantry quickened their step and gazed ahead, eager for the first glimpse of the waters that, at this season of the year, would be swollen and dark with rich silts, the flesh and blood of the motherland.

Nefer and Mintaka rode together in his chariot at the head of the long cavalcade that wound down the caravan road from Gallala. Meren and Merykara rode at his right hand in the second chariot of the column. Over the protests of Merykara, who thought him still too weak and sick, Meren had insisted on being in the van. 'I missed the battle at Gallala, but I vow I will never miss another. As long as there is breath in my body I will ride with my king and my dearest friend.' Though he was thin and pale as an egret he stood proud on the footplate, with the reins in his hands.

The leading chariots topped the escarpment, and below them stretched the green valley of the Nile, with the mighty river itself gleaming like a spill of molten copper from the furnace, glowing red in the early sunlight. Nefer turned and smiled at Meren in the chariot alongside. 'We are coming home!'

Mintaka began singing, softly at first then more strongly as Nefer added his voice to hers.

'Temple of the Gods,

Seat of ten thousand heroes,

Greenest in all the earth,

Our dearest love.

Our sweetest home.

Our very Egypt!'

Then Meren and Merykara were singing with them, and the singing spread back down the column. Squadron after squadron picked up the joyous chorus as they wound down the escarpment.

Another army came to meet them, armed charioteers in the van, generals and captains leading their regiments, and legions of foot-soldiers following them. Behind them followed the elders, the priests and the governors of every nome, all dressed in their robes, chains and decorations of office, some in carriages and others in litters borne by slaves, and still others riding astride or on foot. After them came the dense masses of citizenry, laughing and dancing. Some of the women were carrying their infants and weeping for joy, as they picked out their husbands, lovers, brothers and sons in the ranks of the army of exile coming home.

The two cavalcades came together and mingled, and elders and generals prostrated themselves before Pharaoh's chariot. Nefer dismounted, raised up those he recognized and embraced the mightiest and most powerful of them, calling down the blessings of the gods on all his people.

When he mounted again they fell in behind him, and followed him to the banks of the Nile. There Nefer dismounted again and, fully dressed, plunged into the waters. While they lined the bank and cheered and sang, he bathed ritually and drank of the muddy brown waters.

Mounted once again and dressed in fresh linen robes, with the blue war crown on his head, Nefer led the vast concourse along the river-bank towards the city of Avaris. For a league outside the city the road was lined with the welcoming crowds. They had allayed the dust by sprinkling the road with Nile water, and had spread palm fronds and flowers in his way.

When they reached the city the gates stood wide open and the populace lined the walls. They had hung banners and bunches of sweet flowers and fruits from the ramparts. They sang anthems of loyalty, praise and welcome as Nefer, with Mintaka beside him, drove under the arch of the gateway.

Beautiful as a young god and goddess, they drove first to the magnificent temple on the riverbank that Trok Uruk had built to celebrate his own divinity. Nefer had sent instructions ahead of him, and the stonemasons had already been at work for weeks. They had chiselled away every portrait of the false pharaoh and expunged his name from the walls and tall hypostyle columns. They were still busy engraving the portraits and titles of the winged Horus, and of Pharaoh Nefer Seti, together with descriptions of his victory at the battle of Gallala.

Nefer drove there as his first duty to give thanks to the god and to sacrifice a pair of perfect black bulls before the stone altar. After the religious service he declared a week of holiday, festivity and feasting, with free millet bread, beef, wine and beer for every citizen, and games and theatre to amuse them.

'You are a sly one, my heart,' Mintaka told him admiringly. 'They loved you before, but now they will adore you.'

For how long? Nefer wondered. As soon as the news of our ascension to the throne reaches Naja, in far off Babylon, he will be on the march, if he is not already. The common people will love me until he knocks upon the gates.

--

Pharaoh Naja Kiafan anointed his trusted general Asmor as King of Babylon, a satrap of his own throne. He left him five hundred chariots, two thousand archers and infantry to hold and secure his conquests. Then, with the bulk of his army, he began the march on Egypt to recover his crown and throne from the man who had seized it. Like a snowball rolling down a mountainside, the army of Pharaoh Naja Kiafan gathered weight and impetus as it advanced westwards over plain and mountain pass towards the frontier of Egypt. As he went, the vassal kings flocked to his standard, and by the time he stood on the heights of the Khatmia Pass his army had almost trebled in size.

Naja looked westwards, across the wide sand desert towards the city of Ismailiya at the head of the Great Bitter Lake, and to the borders of his homeland. He had known all along that at this point on the march he would be hampered by the size of his host, embarrassed by multitudes.

Ahead of him lay a great expanse of desert, with neither a single spring nor an oasis to sustain his army until he reached Ismailiya. Once again he was reduced to laying down water points along the route ahead. When he strained his eyes against the glare he could make out the lines of water carts, loaded with clay pots, strung out along the rutted road below the escarpment, like dark worms wriggling through the dun and ochre landscape. For months they had been at work building up water dumps in the desert, burying the filled pots in the sand, then leaving detachments of infantry to guard them while they returned for the next load.

It would take his army almost ten days and nights to make the crossing. During that time they would be strictly rationed, allowed just enough water to sustain the long night marches, and to eke out the burning days when they lay up to rest, enduring the heat in any scrap of shade afforded by linen tents or shelters made from thorn branches and grass.

'I will ride with you in the vanguard.' Heseret spoke at his elbow, breaking into his train of thought.

He glanced at her. 'We have discussed this before.' He frowned. After years of marriage her charms and beauty had begun to pall, overshadowed by her petulance, jealousy and demanding tempers. These days, Naja spent more and more time among his concubines, enduring her jealous tirades when he returned to her bed.

'You will come up with the other women in the baggage train, under the wing of Prenn, the centurion of the rearguard.'

Heseret pouted. Once, that had been appealing but now it was merely irritating. 'So that you can put Lassa with child, just as you have her sister,' she complained. She was referring to the two princesses given to Naja as hostages by the satrap of Sumeria as evidence of his loyalty to the crown of Egypt. The princesses were both young, slim and nubile, with large breasts. They painted their nipples and, in the shameless Sumerian fashion, walked abroad with them naked and uncovered.

'You become tiresome, wife.' Naja lifted his upper lip in a smile that was more a snarl. 'You know that it is political expediency. I needed a son from at least one of the wenches to place upon the throne when the old man dies.'

'Swear on the breath and heart of Seueth that you are not taking Lassa with you in the vanguard,' Heseret insisted.

'I swear it readily.' Naja smiled that deadly smile again. 'I am taking Sinnal of Hurria.' She was another hostage, younger even than the Sumerians, barely fourteen years of age but with bright copper-coloured hair and green eyes. Her buttocks were large and rounded. Heseret knew from experience that Naja would enter through the back gate to the citadel, as readily as through the front.

'I need a son from her as well,' Naja explained, reasonably, 'to place on the throne of Assyria.' He laughed then, a soft, mocking snigger. 'The duties of royalty are onerous indeed.'

She gave him a furious glare, and called for her litter with its screens and cushions of silk to take her back down the column, to where Prenn was bringing up the rearguard.

--

On Taita's advice, Nefer had established a screen of scouts along the shores of the Red Sea to report any invasion by dhows, yet Taita was certain that Naja's main invasion force must come through the Great Sand Desert. Naja and Trok had passed this way on their Mesopotamian adventure. Naja knew the route well, and his army was too large to bring across the Red Sea in boats as Trok had done with his much smaller force.

Thanks to a marvellous innovation by the Magus, Nefer and his staff knew the exact numbers and composition of Naja's muster. One of the centurions, high in the chain of Naja's command, who was an old associate of Taita and who owed him a debt of gratitude, had sent a message to Taita declaring his loyalty to the Pharaoh Nefer Seti and his intention of defecting and coming to join Nefer's army. Through another of his minions, a trader in fine carpets, who was leading a caravan to Beersheba, Taita had sent the centurion a reply, instructing him to remain at the head of his division. 'You are more valuable to us as a source of intelligence than as a warrior,' he had told him, and through the carpet trader had sent him two unusual gifts: a basket of live pigeons and a papyrus scroll on which was set out a secret code.

When the pigeons were released by the centurion, they returned immediately to the coop in Avaris in which they had been hatched, and they carried with them, tied to one leg with a silken thread, a coded message written on a tiny roll of the finest and lightest papyrus sheet. Through these messages, Nefer had in his possession the precise numbers and disposition of the troops Naja commanded. He knew the exact day on which Naja had marched from Babylon, and how many troops he had left there under Asmor. Nefer was able to follow his advance westward, through Damascus and Beersheba and all the other towns and garrisons along his line of march.

Very soon it became apparent that Taita had assessed the situation correctly, and that Naja would not attempt a surprise crossing of the Red Sea. He was indeed intent on a frontal assault through the Great Sand Desert.

Nefer pulled in his pickets from along the Red Sea coast, and immediately moved his headquarters and most of his army forward to the frontier garrison of Ismailiya on the edge of the desert. Here there were bountiful sweet-water wells, and ample grazing for the horses.

While they waited in Ismailiya, reports continued to be carried in by the returning pigeons. Not only did Nefer know Naja's strength, he knew also who commanded each of his divisions.

Mintaka sat on his war council in the fort of Ismailiya. Her contributions were invaluable: she was Hyksos bom, and she knew well those officers on Naja's staff who had once been on her own father's staff. As a child she had listened to her father's assessment of each of them, and she had a formidable memory, trained and sharpened over the bao board. She was able to advise Nefer on the strengths, weaknesses and personal peculiarities of each of these men. She went over the lists they had received.

'Now this one, Centurion Prenn who commands Naja's rearguard, is related to me, for he was one of my father's cousins. I know him well. He taught me to ride. I used to call him Uncle Tonka, which means "Bear" in my language.' She smiled at the memory. 'My father said of him that he was loyal as a hound, cautious and slow, but once he had sunk his teeth into the throat of an enemy he would hang on to the death.'

By this time Meren had almost fully recovered his health and strength. He begged Nefer for employment in some useful role, so Nefer sent him forward with a division of chariots to cover Naja's further advance, once he came down from the heights into the desert.

Meren's scouts watched Naja's water carts carrying their loads of clay jars forward and building up the dumps in the arid land through which Naja must pass to reach the frontier of Egypt. Meren asked to be allowed to attack and disperse the convoys of water carts, but Nefer sent orders to him not to interfere with them, merely to keep them under observation and to note carefully were they placed the water stores.

Then Nefer ordered the last reserves that he had been holding on the river to be brought up, and when these were encamped around Ismailiya he called a council of all their commanders. 'Even with Trok's vehicles that we captured at Gallala, Naja outnumbers us by almost three to one,' he told them. 'All his men are battle-hardened, and his horses trained and in fine condition. We cannot afford to let him cross the frontier and reach the river. We must meet him and fight him here in the desert.'

All that night they sat in council, and Nefer laid out his battle plan and issued his orders. They were to let Naja advance unopposed for the first five days. Then, once he was deeply committed, they would raid and destroy his water stores, both in front and to the rear of his advance. This would trap him in the midst of the sands.

'I know Naja well enough to stake the battle on his arrogance and his overbearing confidence in his own fighting skills. I am certain that even once we cut off his water supply he will not turn back, but will thrust onwards. His forces will reach Ismailiya after a forced dry march of many days through the desert. We will be able to meet them with our horses and troops well rested and watered on a battleground of our own choosing. This will make up some of the deficit in our opposing strengths.'

During the long council, Taita sat silently in the shadows behind Nefer's campaign stool. It seemed that he was dozing, but once in a while he opened his eyes then, blinking like a sleepy owl, closed them again and let his chin droop back on to his chest.

'Our greatest lack is in the number and condition of our chariots.' Nefer went on, 'but we can almost match Naja in archers, slingers and spearmen. I am certain that once he realizes his shortage of water, Naja will drive ahead of his foot-soldiers with all his chariots. Taita and I have devised a plan to lead his vehicles into a trap in which we can exploit the small advantage that we have.

'In front of the town and the wells we will throw up a series of low stone walls behind which our archers and infantry can conceal themselves. These works will be just high enough to block the advance of a chariot.' With a charcoal stick Nefer sketched out a design on the sheet of papyrus spread on the table-top in front of him. Hilto, Shabako, Socco and the rest of his staff craned forward to watch.

'The walls will be laid out in the design of a fish trap.' He drew the inverted funnel shapes, with the apex aimed back towards the fort of Ismailiya.

'How will you lead him into the funnel?' Shabako asked.

'With a charge of our own chariots and the mock retreat you have practised so often,' Nefer explained, 'our archers and slingers will remain concealed behind the walls until Naja follows us into the funnel. The deeper they penetrate, the more tightly his squadrons will be compressed between the walls. They will offer a fine target for our slingers and archers as they pass at close range.'

Even Shabako looked impressed. 'You intend to shut them up in a stockade like cattle, just as you did with Trok.'

They discussed the plan with enthusiasm, offering suggestions and refinements. In the end Nefer put Shabako in charge of building the walls. Taita had spent the last five days surveying and marking them out for him, so the work could begin as soon as it was light the next day.

'We have little time left to us,' Nefer warned them. 'We know that Naja's forces are already drawn up on the heights of the Khatmia. His water wagons have almost finished laying down the dumps. I expect he will begin his descent of the escarpment within days.'

The council broke up at last and the officers hurried away to take up the tasks that Nefer had allocated to them. At last only three remained in the tower room of the old fort at Ismailiya, Nefer, Taita and Mintaka.