The Quest (Novels of Ancient Egypt) Read online

  The dawn breeze veered into the south, wafting to him the stench of half-rotten fish from the smoking racks. He moved away to avoid it and the memory he was seeking rushed in.

  Where else would you search for a moon fish? You will find me hiding among the other fishes. It was the voice of Fenn, speaking through the mouth of the stone image of the goddess. Was the child they were pursuing a soul caught up in the wheel of creation? The reincarnation of someone who had lived long ago?

  ‘She promised to return,’ he said aloud. ‘Is it possible – or does my own longing delude me?’ And then he answered himself: ‘There are things that surpass the wildest imagining of mankind. Nothing is impossible.’

  Taita glanced around swiftly to make certain that nobody was watching him, then moved casually to the edge of the village and walked to the smoking racks. As soon as he was out of sight his attitude changed. He stood like a dog testing the air for the scent of its quarry. His nerves jumped. She was very close, her presence almost palpable. Holding his staff at the ready to fend off a stroke from her assegai he moved forward. Every few paces he went down on one knee to try to see under or between the racks on which the layers of fish were packed densely together. At intervals bundles of firewood and drifting clouds of smoke obstructed his view. He had to circle each wood-pile as he came to it to make certain she was not hiding behind one, which slowed his progress. By now the rays of the early sun were flooding the village. Then as he crept round another wood-pile he heard a stealthy movement ahead. He peered round the corner. Nobody was there. He glanced at the ground and saw the prints of her small bare feet in the grey ash. She was aware that she was being stalked, moving just ahead of him, darting from one wood-pile to the next.

  ‘There is no sign of the brat. She is not here,’ he called, to an imaginary companion, and started back towards the village. He went noisily, tapping the racks with his staff, then doubled back in a wide circle, moving swiftly and silently.

  He reached a position close to where he had last seen her footprints, and squatted behind a wood-pile to wait for her. He was alert for any movement or the faintest sound. Now that she had lost sight of him, she would become nervous and change her position again. He threw a spell of concealment round himself. Then, from behind the screen, he reached out for her, searching the ether.

  ‘Ah!’ he murmured, as he descried her. She was very close, but not moving. He sensed her fear and uncertainty: she did not know where he was. He saw that she was cowering under one of the wood-piles. Now he focused all his power on her, sending out impulses to lure her towards him.

  ‘Magus! Where are you?’ Meren called, from the direction of the village. When he received no answer, his voice rose urgently. ‘Magus, do you hear me?’ Then he was coming towards where Taita waited.

  That’s right, Taita encouraged him silently. Keep coming. You will force her to move. Ah! There she goes.

  The girl was moving again. She had crawled out from under the wood and was scurrying in his direction, running ahead of Meren.

  Come, little one. He tightened the tentacles of the spell round her. Come to me.

  ‘Magus!’ Meren called again, much closer. The girl appeared in front of Taita, at the corner of the wood-pile. She paused to glance back towards where Meren’s voice had come from and he saw that she was quivering with terror. She looked in his direction. Her face was a hideous mask of clay, her hair built up in a mass on top of her head with a mixture of what looked like clay and acacia gum. Her eyes were so bloodshot from the smoke of the fires and the dye that had run from her hair that he could not make out the colour of the irises. Her teeth had been deliberately blackened. All of the Luo women they had captured had blackened their teeth and wore the same ugly hairstyle. Clearly, it was their primitive idea of beauty.

  As she stood there, terrified, her head cocked, Taita opened his Inner Eye. Her aura sprang up around her, enveloping her in a sublimely magnificent cloak of living light, just as he had seen it in his dreams. Beneath the grotesque coating of clay and filth, this sorry, bedraggled creature was Fenn. She had returned to him, as she had promised. The emotion that swept over him was more powerful than any he had experienced in his long life. It surpassed in intensity the grief that had overwhelmed him at her death, which had ended her other life, when he had removed her viscera and wrapped her corpse in the linen bandages and laid her in the stone sarcophagus.

  Now she was restored to him at the same age she had been when she had first been placed in his care all those bleak, lonely years ago. All that grief and sorrow was paid off with this single coin of joy, to which every cord, muscle and nerve in his body resonated.

  The cloak of concealment he had spun round himself was disturbed by it. The child picked it up at once. She turned and stared in his direction, her bloodshot eyes enormous in the grotesque mask. She sensed his presence, but could not see him. He realized that she possessed the power. As yet her psychic gift was undeveloped and untutored, but he knew that, under his loving instruction, it would in time match his own. The rising sun shot a beam into her eyes, and their true lustre glowed in the deepest shade of green. Fenn green.

  Meren was running in their direction, his footsteps pounding on the hard earth. There was only one escape route open to Fenn: down the narrow passage between the wood-pile and the smoking racks. She ran straight into Taita’s arms. As they closed round her she shrieked in shock and renewed terror and dropped the assegai. Although she struggled and clawed at his eyes, Taita held her close to his chest. Her fingernails were long and ragged, black dirt was caked under them and they raised bloody welts across his forehead and cheeks. Still holding her with one arm circled round her waist, he took her arms one at a time and trapped them between their bodies. Now that she was helpless he leant close to her face and stared into her eyes, taking control of her. Instinctively she knew what he was doing and pushed forward to meet him, but just in time he divined her intention and jerked his head back sharply. Her sharp black teeth snapped shut a finger’s breadth from the tip of his nose.

  ‘Light of my eyes, I still have need of this old nose of mine. If you are hungry I will provide tastier fare.’ He smiled.

  At that moment Meren burst into sight, his expression of consternation and alarm. ‘Magus!’ he shouted. ‘Do not let that filthy vixen near you. She has already tried to murder one man and now she will do you some grave injury.’ He rushed towards them. ‘Let me get my hands on her. I will take her to the swamp and drown her in the nearest pool.’

  ‘Back, Meren!’ Taita did not raise his voice. ‘Don’t touch her.’

  Meren checked. ‘But, Magus, she will—’

  ‘She will do no such thing. Go, Meren. Leave us alone. We love each other. I just have to convince her of it.’

  Still Meren hesitated.

  ‘Go, I say. At once.’

  Meren went.

  Taita looked into Fenn’s eyes and smiled reassuringly. ‘Fenn, I have waited so long for you.’ He was using the voice of power, but she resisted him fiercely. She spat, and bubbles of her saliva ran down his face to drip off his chin.

  ‘You were not so strong when we first met. You were sullen and rebellious, oh, yes, indeed you were, but not as strong as you are now.’ He chuckled and she blinked. No Luo had ever emitted such a sound. A spark of interest flashed for an instant in the green depths of her eyes, then she glared at him.

  ‘You were so beautiful then, but look at you now.’ His voice still carried the hypnotic inflection. ‘You are a vision from the void.’ He made it sound like an endearment. ‘Your hair is filthy.’ He stroked it but she tried to duck. It was not possible to guess the true colour of her hair under the thick clay and acacia gum, but he kept his voice calm and his smile reassuring as a stream of red lice crawled out of the clotted mass and climbed up his arm.

  ‘By Ahura Maasda and the Truth, you stink worse than any polecat,’ he told her. ‘It will take a month of scrubbing to get down to your skin.’ She wriggled and squ
irmed to be free. ‘Now you are rubbing your filth on to me. I shall be in no better case than you by the time I have quietened you. We shall have to camp away from Meren and his troopers. Even rough soldiers will not withstand our combined odour.’ He kept speaking: the sense of the words was unimportant, but the tone and inflection gradually lulled her. He felt her begin to relax, and the hostile light in her green eyes faded. She blinked almost sleepily, and he relaxed his grip. At that she shook herself awake, and the malevolence flared again. He had to hold her hard as she renewed her struggles.

  ‘You are indomitable.’ He let the admiration and approval sound in his voice. ‘You have the heart of a warrior, and the determination of the goddess you once were.’ This time she quietened more readily. The migrating lice nipped Taita under his tunic, but he ignored them and continued to talk.

  ‘Let me tell you about yourself, Fenn. You were once my ward, as you have become again. You were the daughter of an evil man who cared little for you. To this day I cannot fathom how he sired a lovely thing like you. You were beautiful, Fenn, beyond the telling of it. Under the fleas, lice and dirt I know you are still.’ Slowly her resistance faded as he related her childhood to her in loving detail, and recounted some of the funny things she had done or said. When he laughed now she looked at him with interest rather than anger. She began to blink again. This time when he relaxed his grip she did not attempt to escape but sat quietly in his lap. The sun had reached its zenith when at last he stood up. She looked up at him solemnly and he reached down to take her hand. She did not pull away.

  ‘Come along, now. If you are not hungry, I certainly am.’ He set off towards the village and she trotted at his side.

  Meren had set up a temporary camp well away from the village: in the sun the Luo corpses would soon begin to rot and the area become uninhabitable. As they approached the camp, he hurried to meet them. ‘I am glad to see you, Magus. I thought the vixen had done away with you,’ he shouted. Fenn hid behind Taita and clung to one of his legs as Meren came up to them. ‘By the wounded eye of Horus, she stinks. I can smell her from here.’

  ‘Lower your voice,’ Taita ordered. ‘Ignore her. Do not look at her like that or you will undo my hard work in an instant. Go ahead of us to the camp and warn your men not to stare at her or alarm her. Have food ready for her.’

  ‘So now we have a wild filly to break?’ Meren shook his head ruefully.

  ‘Oh, no! You underestimate the task ahead of us,’ Taita assured him.

  Taita and Fenn sat in the shade under the great sausage tree in the centre of the camp, and one of the men brought food. Fenn tasted the dhurra cake gingerly, but after the first mouthfuls she ate ravenously. Then she turned her attention to the cold slices of wild duck breast. She stuffed them into her mouth so rapidly that she choked and coughed.

  ‘I can see you need instruction in manners before you are fit to dine with Pharaoh,’ Taita observed, as she gnawed the duck bones with her black teeth. When she had stuffed her skinny belly to bursting point, he called for Nakonto. Like most of the men, he had been watching from a discreet distance, but he came to squat in front of them. Fenn huddled closer to Taita and stared at the huge black man with renewed suspicion.

  ‘Ask the child her name. I am sure she speaks and understands Luo,’ Taita instructed, and Nakonto spoke a few words to her. It was clear that she understood him, but her face set and her mouth closed in a hard, stubborn line. He tried for a while longer to induce her to answer him, but Fenn would not budge.

  ‘Fetch one of the captured Luo women,’ Taita told Nakonto. He left them briefly, and when he returned he was dragging with him a wailing old woman from the village.

  ‘Ask her if she knows this girl,’ Taita said.

  Nakonto had to speak sharply to the woman before she would cease whining and weeping, but at last she made a lengthy statement. ‘She knows her,’ Nakonto translated. ‘She says she is a devil. They drove her out of the village, but she lived close by in the forest, and she has brought bad witchcraft on the tribe. They believe it was she who sent you to kill their men.’

  ‘So the child is not of her tribe?’ Taita asked.

  The old woman’s reply was a vehement denial. ‘No, she is a stranger. One of the women found her floating in the swamps in a tiny boat made of reeds.’ Nakonto described a papyrus cradle such as Egyptian peasant women wove for their infants. ‘She brought the devil to the village and named her Khona Manzi, which means “the one from the waters”. The woman was childless and for that reason had been rejected by her husband. She took this strange creature as her own. She dressed her ugly hair in the decent fashion, and covered her fish-white body with clay and ash to protect her from the sun and the insects, as is fitting and customary. She fed her and cared for her.’ The old woman looked at Fenn with evident distaste.

  ‘Where is this woman?’ Taita asked.

  ‘She has died of some strange disease that the devil child brought down upon her with witchcraft.’

  ‘Is that why you drove her out of the village?’

  ‘Not for that reason alone. She brought many other afflictions upon us. In the same season that she came into the village the waters failed and the swamp, which is our home, began to shrivel and die. It was the devil child’s work.’ The old woman gobbled with outrage. ‘She brought sickness upon us that blinded our children, made many of our young women barren and our men impotent.’

  ‘All this from one child?’ Taita asked.

  Nakonto translated the woman’s reply. ‘She is no ordinary child. She is a devil and a sorcerer. She led our enemies to our secret places, and caused them to triumph over us, just as she has now brought you to attack us.’

  Then Fenn spoke for the first time. Her voice was filled with bitter anger.

  ‘What does she say?’ Taita asked.

  ‘She says that the woman lies. She has done none of those things. She does not know how to make witchcraft. She loved the woman who was her mother, and she did not kill her.’ The old woman replied to this with equal venom, and then the two were screeching at each other.

  For a while Taita listened to them with mild amusement, then told Nakonto, ‘Take the woman back to the village. She is no match for the child.’

  Nakonto laughed. ‘You have found a lion cub as your new pet, old one. We will all learn to fear her.’

  As soon as they were gone Fenn quietened.

  ‘Come,’ Taita invited her. She recognized his meaning, if not the word, and stood up at once. As he walked away she ran after him and took his hand again. The gesture was so unaffected that Taita was deeply moved. She began to chatter naturally, so he answered her although he did not understand a word she said. He went to his saddle-bag and found the leather roll of his surgical instruments. He paused only to speak to Meren: ‘Send Nontu back to fetch the rest of the men and horses out of the swamps and bring them here. Keep Nakonto with us for he is our eyes and our tongue.’

  Then, with Fenn still in tow, he went down to the edge of the swamp and found a clear opening among the reeds. He waded out knee deep, then sat down in the lukewarm water. Fenn watched him from the bank with interest. When he splashed handfuls of water over his head she burst out laughing for the first time.

  ‘Come,’ he called, and she jumped into the pool without hesitation. He sat her between his knees with her back to him and poured water over her head. The mask of filth began to dissolve and run down her neck and over her shoulders. Gradually patches of pale skin started to show through, speckled with louse bites. When he tried to wash the filth out of her hair, the congealed gum defied his best efforts to dislodge it. Fenn wriggled and protested as he pulled at her scalp. ‘Very well. We will deal with that later.’ He stood her up and began to scrub her with handfuls of sand from the bottom of the pool. She giggled when he tickled her ribs, and tried half-heartedly to escape, but she was still giggling when he pulled her back. She was enjoying his attention. When at last he had cleaned away the superficial layers of d
irt he fetched a bronze razor from the surgical roll and started on her scalp. With the utmost care he began to scrape away the matted hair.

  She bore it stoically, even when the razor nicked her and drew blood. He had to keep stropping the edge for her matted hair blunted it after only a few strokes. It fell away in clumps, and gradually he exposed her pale scalp. When at last he had finished he laid aside the razor and studied her. ‘What big ears you have!’ he exclaimed. Her bald head seemed too large for the thin neck it was balanced upon. In contrast her eyes were even bigger, and her ears stuck out at each side of her head like those of a baby elephant. ‘Looked at from every angle and in any light, and giving you the benefit in any area of doubt, you are still an ugly little thing.’ She recognized the affection in his tone and smiled at him trustingly with the blackened teeth. He felt tears sting his eyelids, and wondered at himself. ‘When did you last find a tear to shed, you old fool?’ He turned away from her and reached for the flask that contained his special salve, a blend of oils and herbs, his sovereign cure for all minor cuts, bruises, sores and other ailments. He massaged it into her scalp and she leant her head against him, closing her eyes like a kitten being petted. He kept talking to her softly, and every now and then she opened her eyes, looked up at his face, then closed them again. When he had finished they climbed out of the pool, and sat together. While the sun and the hot breeze dried their bodies, Taita selected a pair of bronze forceps and went over every inch of her. The herbal salve had killed most of the lice and other vermin, but he found many still stuck to her skin. He plucked them off her, and crushed the life out of them. To Fenn’s delight, they made a satisfying pop as they exploded in a spot of blood. When he had removed the last one, she took the forceps from him, and set about the insects that had changed their abode from her to him. Her eye was sharper and her fingers were more nimble than his as she ruffled through his silver beard and inspected his armpits for signs of life. Then she searched lower down. She was a savage and showed no inhibition as she ran light fingers over the silver scar at the base of his belly where he had been castrated. Taita had always tried to conceal this mark of shame from other eyes, except those of Lostris when she was alive. Now she was alive again and he felt no embarrassment. Yet although her actions were innocent and natural, he removed her hand.