Pharaoh

In length the hull of the Memnon exceeded 100 cubits. She drew 3 cubits of water fully loaded. Her crew numbered 230. She shipped a total of 56 oars in 3 banks a side, as her designation of trireme suggests. The staggered lower rowing benches and the outriggers on the top tier of oars prevented the strokes of the oars interfering with each other. Her width was less than 13 cubits so she was lightning fast through the water, and easy to beach. Her single mast could be lowered, but when raised it spread a massive square sail. She was quite simply the most beautifully designed fighting ship afloat.

As she came in to moor on the river-bank I noticed a tall mysterious figure in the stern. He was dressed in a long red robe and a hood of the same colour that covered his face, except for the eye slits. It was apparent that he did not wish to be recognized, and as the crew made the ship fast, he went below without revealing his features or giving any other suggestion of his identity.

‘Who is that?’ I demanded of Weneg. ‘Is this who we have come to meet?’

He shook his head. ‘I cannot say. I will wait for you here ashore.’

I did not hesitate but clambered up on to the Memnon’s bows and strode down the length of the upper deck until I reached the hatch down which the red-robed figure had disappeared. I stamped my foot on the deck, and immediately a deep but cultured voice replied. I did not recognize it.

‘The hatch is open. Come down and close it behind you.’

I followed these instructions and stooped into the cabin below. The headroom was minimal, for she was a fighting ship and not a pleasure cruiser. My red-robed host was already seated. He made no attempt to rise, but he indicated the narrow bench facing him.

‘Please excuse my attire but for reasons that will be immediately clear to you I need to keep my identity hidden from the common flock, at least for the immediate future. I knew you well when I was a child, but circumstances have kept us apart since then. On the other hand you were well acquainted with my father, who held you in the highest regard, and more recently my elder brother who is less enthusiastic …’

Before he finished speaking I knew beyond any doubt who it was that sat before me. I scrambled to my feet to accord him the respect that he so richly deserved, but in the process I cracked my head resoundingly on the beams of the upper deck above me. These were hewn from the finest Lebanese cedar, and my skull was no match for them. I collapsed again on my bench with both hands cradling my head and a thin trickle of blood running into my left eye.

My host leaped to his feet but he had the good sense to remain crouching. He whipped the red hood off his own head and rolled it into a ball. Then he clapped it over my wound, pressing down hard to stem the flow of my life’s blood.

‘You are not the first to sustain the same injury,’ he assured me. ‘Painful but not fatal, I assure you, my Lord Taita.’ Now that his hood was adorning my scalp, rather than covering his features, I was able to confirm that this was indeed the Crown Prince Rameses who was tending my injury.

‘Please, Your Royal Highness, it is merely a scratch which I richly deserve for my clumsiness.’ I was embarrassed by his solicitude, but grateful for the opportunity to gather my wits again and reassess the prince at such close quarters.

He ranked as Lord High Admiral of the Fleet, and he was so assiduous in his duties that he very seldom made himself available for light socializing and mingling with any other than his own naval officers or, naturally enough, his father. Of course I had romped with him as a child and had told him fairy tales of noble princes saving lovely maidens from dragons and other monsters, but as he approached puberty we had drifted apart and Rameses had come totally under his own father’s influence. Since then I had never again been familiar with him. So now I was surprised at how closely he resembled his father, Pharaoh Tamose. Of course, this resemblance reaffirmed the high regard in which I had always held him. If anything he was even more handsome than his father. It gave me a twinge of conscience to even think this; however, it was the truth.

His jawline was stronger, and his teeth more even and white. He was a little taller than his father had been, but his waist was leaner, and his limbs more supple. His skin was a most remarkable shade of deep gold, reflecting his mother Queen Masara’s Abyssinian ancestry. His eyes were a brighter and more lustrous shade of the same hue, and their gaze was piercing, but at the same time intelligent and kindly.

My heart went out to him once again, as though the intervening years had never existed. His next words confirmed my instincts: ‘We have many things in common, Taita. But at the moment the most pressing of them is my elder brother’s baleful and implacable enmity. Pharaoh Utteric Turo will never rest until he sees both of us dead. Of course, you are already under sentence of death. But so am I, although not as openly but with equal or even greater relish and anticipation.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why does your brother hate you?’ The question came easily to my lips. I felt that with this man I was perfectly in accord. I had nothing to hide from him, nor had he anything to hide from me.

‘It is simply because Pharaoh Tamose loved me and you more than he loved Utteric, his eldest son.’ He paused for a heartbeat, and then went on, ‘And also because my brother is mad. He is haunted by the ghosts and phantoms of his own twisted mind. He wishes to dispose of any person wiser and nobler than he is.’

‘You know of this for a certainty?’ I asked, and he nodded.

‘For a certainty, yes! I have my sources, Taita, as I know you do also. In secret and only to his sycophants, Utteric has boasted of his hostile intentions towards me.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’ I asked and his reply rang in my ears like my own voice speaking.

‘I cannot bring myself to strike him down. My father loved him: that is enough to stay my hand. But neither am I going to let him murder me. I am leaving Egypt this very day.’ His tone was calm and reasonable. ‘Will you come with me, Taita?’

‘I served your father with joy,’ I answered him. ‘I can do no less for you, my prince who should be Pharaoh.’ He came to me and clasped my right hand in a gesture of friendship and accord, and I went on speaking, ‘However, there are others who have put themselves at risk for my sake.’

‘Yes, I know who you mean,’ Rameses agreed. ‘Captain Weneg and his legionaries are fine and loyal men. I have spoken with them already. They will throw in their lot with us.’

I nodded. ‘Then I have no further quibble. Wherever you lead I will follow, my Lord Rameses.’ I knew very well where that was; better indeed than the prince himself. However, now was not yet the time to broach that subject.

The two of us went up on deck again and I saw that on the bank Weneg and his men had already dismantled the chariots; as we watched his men carried the parts over the gangplank and sent them down into the ship’s hold. Then they swayed the horses aboard and sent them down below also. In under an hour the Memnon was ready to sail. We cast off from the bank and turned the bows into the north. With the wind in our sails, the river current pushing us and the treble banks of oars beating the Nile waters to foam, we headed northwards towards the open sea and freedom from Pharaoh’s malignant and pernicious thrall.

One of the few benefits of being a long liver is to be gifted with remarkable powers of healing and recuperation from injury. Almost within the hour the self-inflicted wound to my scalp stopped oozing blood and began to dry up and shrivel away, and before we reached the estuarine mouth of the Nile where it debouched into the great Middle Sea the whip welts, bruises and other injuries inflicted upon me by the dreadful Doog and his minions had healed completely, leaving my skin smooth and glowing with health, like that of a young man again.

During the ensuing long days as we rowed northwards down the river towards the sea the prince and I had plenty of time to renew our acquaintance.

The next pressing decision we had to make was to decide our ultimate destination once we had left Egypt. It seemed that Rameses had conceived the horrifying notion of sailing out through the rocky Gates of Hathor at the end of the world – just to see what lay beyond them. I knew very well what lay beyond. The great nothingness lay beyond. If we were so ill advised as to take that course we would simply drop off the end of the world and fall in darkness through all eternity.

‘How do you know that is what will happen to us?’ Rameses demanded of me.

‘Because nobody has ever returned from beyond the Gates,’ I explained quite reasonably.

‘How do you know that?’ he wanted to know.

‘Name me one who has,’ I challenged him.

‘Scaeva of Hispan.’

‘I have never heard of him. Who was he?’

‘He was a great explorer. My great-grandfather met him.’

‘But did you ever meet him?’

‘Of course not! He died long before I was born.’

‘So your great-grandfather told you about him?’

‘Well, not really. You see he also died before I was born. My own father told me the story of Senebsen.’

‘You know how much I respect the memory of your father; however, I never had the opportunity to discuss this Senebsen’s travels with him. Moreover, I doubt I would have been sufficiently convinced by third-hand accounts of what lies beyond the Gates to take the risk of travelling there myself.’

Most fortuitously I had a dream two nights later. I dreamed that the princesses Bekatha and Tehuti together with all their multitudinous children had been captured by Farsian pirates and chained to a rock at the edge of the sea as an offering to appease the terrible sea monster which was known as the Tarquist. This creature has wings with which it is able to fly through the air like a great bird or swim through the sea like a mighty fish. It also has fifty mouths which are insatiable for human flesh and with which it is able to destroy even the greatest ships ever built by men.

Naturally I was extremely reluctant to tell Rameses of my dream, but in the end I had to take into account the solemn duty I had sworn to the royal house of Egypt. Of course, Rameses was fully aware of my reputation as a soothsayer and a reader of dreams. He listened quietly but seriously to my own interpretation of the dream, then without giving his own opinion he went to the bows of the ship where he sequestered himself for the remainder of the afternoon. He came back to me in the poop as the sun was setting, and wasted no words.

‘I charge you most strictly to tell me the truth about what happened to my two aunts when they were sent by my father, Pharaoh Tamose, to the Empire of Crete to become the wives of the Great Minos, the King of Crete. I understood that they carried out their duty as my father decreed and they became the wives of the Minos, but then they were killed in the violent eruption of Mount Cronus. This is what my father told me. But then I was present when my brother Utteric accused you of treachery and false pretences. He says that my aunts survived the volcanic eruptions which killed their husband, the Minos, but then they neglected their duty and rather than returning to Egypt they eloped with those two rogues Zaras and Hui and disappeared. I discounted Utteric’s accusations as the ravings of a lunatic, but now this dream of yours seems to endorse the notion that they are still alive.’ He broke off and regarded me with that piercing gaze of his. ‘Tell me the truth, Taita,’ he challenged me. ‘What really happened to my aunts?’

‘There were circumstances?’ I hedged at the direct question.

‘That is no answer,’ he chided me. ‘What do you mean by There were circumstances.’

‘Please let me give you another example, Rameses.’

He nodded. ‘I am listening.’

‘Suppose a prince of the royal house of Egypt becomes aware that his elder brother who is Pharaoh was intent on murdering him for no good reason, and he decided to flee his country rather than stay and be killed. Would you consider that to be dereliction of his duty?’ I asked, and Rameses rocked back on his heels and stared at me in astonishment.

At last he shook his head as if to clear it, and then said softly, ‘You mean, would I count that as extenuating circumstances?’

‘Would you?’