The Quest (Novels of Ancient Egypt) Read online

  The caravans coming up from Egypt and going on down through the rocky wilderness to Sagafa on the Red Sea brought them regular news from Mother Egypt. When another arrived Taita sent Meren down to converse with the caravan master; they all treated Meren with deep respect for they knew he was the confidant of Taita, the renowned magus. That evening he returned from the town and reported, ‘Obed Tindali, the caravan merchant, begs you to remember him in your prayers to the great god Horus. He has sent you a generous gift of the finest quality coffee beans from far-off Ethiopia, but I warn you now to steel yourself, Magus, for he has no tidings of comfort from the delta for you.’

  The old man lowered his eyes to hide the shadow of fear that passed behind them. What worse news could there be than they had already received? He looked up again and spoke sternly: ‘Do not try to protect me, Meren. Hold nothing back. Has the flood of the Nile commenced?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Meren replied softly, regretfully. ‘Seven years now without the inundation.’

  Taita’s stern expression wavered. Without the rise of the waters and the rich, fertile bounty of alluvial soils they brought from the south, Egypt was given over to famine, pestilence and death.

  ‘Magus, it grieves me deeply but there is still worse to relate,’ murmured Meren. ‘What little water still remains in the Nile has turned to blood.’

  Taita stared at him. ‘Blood?’ he echoed. ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘Magus, even the shrunken pools of the river have turned dark red and they stink like the congealed blood of cadavers,’ Meren said. ‘Neither man nor beast can drink from them. The horses and cattle, even the goats, are perishing from thirst. Their skeletal bodies line the riverbanks.’

  ‘Plague and affliction! Such a thing has never been dreamed of in the history of the earth since the beginning time,’ Taita whispered.

  ‘And it is not a single plague, Magus,’ Meren went on doggedly. ‘From the bloody pools of the Nile have emerged great hordes of spiny toads, large and swift as dogs. Rank poison oozes from the warts that cover their hideous bodies. They eat the corpses of the dead animals. But that is not enough. The people say great Horus should forbid it, that these monsters will attack any child, or any person who is too old or feeble to defend himself. They will devour him while he still writhes and screams.’ Meren paused and drew a deep breath. ‘What is happening to our earth? What dreadful curse has been placed upon us, Magus?’

  In all the decades they had been together, since the great battle against the usurpers, the false pharaohs, since the ascension of Nefer Seti to the double throne of Upper and Lower Egypt, Meren had been at Taita’s side. He was the adopted son who could never have sprung naturally from Taita’s gelded loins. Nay, Meren was more than a son: his love for the old man surpassed that of a blood tie. Now Taita was moved by his distress, although his own was as pervasive.

  ‘Why is this happening to the land we love, to the people we love, to the king we love?’ Meren pleaded.

  Taita shook his head, and remained silent for a long while. Then he leant across to touch Meren’s upper arm. ‘The gods are angry,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ Meren insisted. The mighty warrior and stalwart companion was rendered almost childlike by his superstitious dread. ‘What is the offence?’

  ‘Since our return to Egypt I have sought the answer to that question. I have made sacrifice and I have searched the breadth and depth of the skies for some sign. The cause of their divine anger eludes me still. It is almost as though it is cloaked by some baleful presence.’

  ‘For Pharaoh and Egypt, for all of us, you must find the answer, Magus,’ Meren urged. ‘But where can you still search for it?’

  ‘It will come to me soon, Meren. This is presaged by the auguries. It will be carried by some unexpected messenger – perhaps a man or a demon, a beast or a god. Perhaps it will appear as a sign in the heavens, written in a star. But the answer will come to me here at Gallala.’

  ‘When, Magus? Is it not already too late?’

  ‘Perhaps this very night.’

  Taita rose to his feet in a single lithe motion. Despite his great age he moved like a young man. His agility and resilience never ceased to amaze Meren, even after all the years he had spent at his side. Taita picked up his staff from the corner of the terrace and leant lightly on it as he paused at the bottom of the stairs to look up to the high tower. The villagers had built it for him. Every family in Gallala had taken part in the labour. It was a tangible sign of the love and reverence they felt for the old magus, who had opened the sweet-water spring that nourished the town, who protected them with the invisible but potent power of his magic.

  Taita started up the circular staircase that wound up the outside of the tower; the treads were narrow and open to the drop, unprotected by a balustrade. He went up like an ibex, not watching his feet, the tip of his staff tapping lightly on the stones. When he reached the platform on the summit, he settled on the silken prayer rug, facing east. Meren placed a silver flask beside him, then took his place behind him, close enough to respond swiftly if Taita needed him, but not so close that he would intrude on the magus’s concentration.

  Taita removed the horn stopper from the flask and took a mouthful of the sharply bitter fluid. He swallowed it slowly, feeling the warmth spreading from his belly through every muscle and nerve in his body, flooding his mind with a crystalline radiance. He sighed softly and allowed the Inner Eye of his soul to open under its balmy influence.

  Two nights previously the old moon had been swallowed by the monster of night, and now the sky belonged only to the stars. Taita watched as they began to appear in order of their ranking, the brightest and most powerful leading the train. Soon they thronged the heavens in teeming multitudes, bathing the desert with a silvery luminance. Taita had studied them all his life. He had thought he knew all that there was to know and understand of them, but now, through his Inner Eye, he was developing a new understanding of the qualities and position of each in the eternal scheme of matter, and in the affairs of men and gods. There was one bright, particular star that he sought out eagerly. He knew it was nearest of all to where he sat. As soon as he saw it all his senses were exalted: that evening it seemed to hang directly above the tower.

  The star had first appeared in the sky exactly ninety days after the mummification of Queen Lostris, on the night he had sealed her into her tomb. Its appearance had been miraculous. Before she died she had promised him that she would return to him, and he felt a deep conviction that the star was the fulfilment of her oath. She had never left him. For all these years her nova had been his lodestar. When he looked up at it, the desolation that had dominated his soul since her death was alleviated.

  Now when he gazed at it with his Inner Eye he saw that Lostris’s star was surrounded by her aura. Although it was diminutive when compared to some of the astral colossi, no other body in the heavens could match its splendour. Taita felt his love for Lostris burn steadily, undiminished, warming his soul. Suddenly his whole body stiffened with alarm and a coldness spread through his veins towards his heart.

  ‘Magus!’ Meren had sensed his change of mood. ‘What ails you?’ He clasped Taita’s shoulder, his other hand on the hilt of his sword. Unable to speak in his distress, Taita shrugged him away, and continued to stare upwards.

  In the interval since he had last laid eyes upon it, Lostris’s star had swollen to several times its normal size. Its once bright and constant aura had become intermittent, the emanations fluttering as disconsolately as the torn pennant of a defeated army. Its body was distorted, bulging at each end and narrowing in the centre.

  Even Meren noticed the change: ‘Your star! Something has happened to it. What does this mean?’ He knew how important it was to Taita.

  ‘I cannot yet say,’ Taita whispered. ‘Leave me here, Meren. Go to your sleeping mat. I must have no distraction. Come for me at dawn.’

  Taita kept watch until the star faded with the approach of the sun, but by the time
Meren returned to lead him down from the tower, he knew that Lostris’s star was moribund.

  Though he was exhausted from his long night’s vigil, he could not sleep. The image of the dying star filled his mind, and he was harried by dark, formless forebodings. This was the last and most awful manifestation of evil. First there had been the plagues that killed man and beast, and now this terrible malignancy, which destroyed the stars. The following night Taita did not return to the tower but went alone into the desert, seeking solace. Although Meren had been instructed not to follow his master, he did so at a distance. Of course, Taita sensed his presence and confounded him by cloaking himself in a spell of concealment. Angry, and worried for his master’s safety, Meren searched for him all night. At sunrise when he hurried back to Gallala to raise a search party, he found Taita sitting alone on the terrace of the old temple.

  ‘You disappoint me, Meren. It is unlike you to wander away and neglect your duties,’ Taita chided him. ‘Now do you propose to starve me? Summon the new maidservant you have employed, and let us hope her cooking is not eclipsed by her pretty face.’

  He did not sleep during that day, but sat alone in the shade at the far end of the terrace. As soon as they had eaten the evening meal he climbed to the top of the tower once more. The sun was only a finger below the horizon, but he was determined not to waste a moment of the hours of darkness when the star would be revealed to him. Night came, as swiftly and stealthily as a thief. Taita strained his eyes into the east. The stars pricked through the darkling arch of the night sky, and grew brighter. Then, abruptly, the Star of Lostris appeared above his head. He was amazed that it had left its constant position in the train of the planets. Now it hung like a guttering lantern flame above the tower of Gallala.

  It was no longer a star. In the few short hours since he had last laid eyes upon it, it had erupted into a fiery cloud and was blowing itself apart. Dark, ominous vapours billowed around it, lit by internal fires that were consuming it in a mighty blaze that lit the heavens above his head.

  Taita waited and watched through the long hours of darkness. The maimed star did not move from its position high above his head. It was still there at sunrise, and the following night it appeared again in the same heavenly station. Night after night the star remained fixed in the sky like a mighty beacon, whose eerie light must reach to the ends of the heavens. The clouds of destruction that enveloped it swirled and eddied. The fires flared up in its centre, then died away, only to flare again in a different place.

  At dawn the townsfolk came up to the ancient temple and waited for an audience with the magus in the shade of the tall columns of the hypostyle hall. When Taita descended from his tower they crowded around him, begging for an explanation of the mighty eruption of flames that hung over their city: ‘O mighty Magus, does this herald another plague? Has Egypt not suffered enough? Please explain these terrible omens to us.’ But he could tell them nothing for their comfort. None of his studies had prepared him for anything like the unnatural behaviour of the Star of Lostris.

  The new moon waxed full and its light softened the fearful image of the burning star. When it waned, the Star of Lostris dominated the heavens once more, burning so brightly that all other stars paled into insignificance beside it. As if summoned by this beacon, a dark cloud of locusts came out of the south and descended on Gallala. They stayed for two days and devastated the irrigated fields, leaving not a single ear of dhurra corn or a leaf on the olive trees. The branches of the pomegranates bent under the weight of the swarms, then broke off. On the morning of the third day the insects rose in a vast, murmurous cloud and flew westward towards the Nile, to wreak more devastation on lands already dying from the failure of the Nile flood.

  The land of Egypt quailed, and the population gave in to despair.

  Then another visitor came to Gallala. He appeared during the night, but the flames of the Star of Lostris burned so brightly, like the last flare of an oil lamp before it expires, that Meren could point out the caravan to Taita when it was still a great distance away.

  ‘Those beasts of burden are from a far-off land,’ Meren remarked. The camel was not indigenous to Egypt and was still rare enough to excite his interest. ‘They do not follow the caravan route but come out of the desert. All this is strange. We must be wary of them.’ The foreign travellers did not waver but came directly to the temple, almost as though they were guided there. The camel drivers couched their animals, and there was the usual hubbub of a caravan setting up camp.

  ‘Go down to them,’ Taita ordered. ‘Find out what you can about them.’

  Meren did not return until the sun was well clear of the horizon. ‘There are twenty men, all servants and retainers. They say they have travelled for many months to reach us.’

  ‘Who is their leader? What did you learn of him?’

  ‘I did not lay eyes on him. He has retired to rest. That is his tent in the centre of the encampment. It is of the finest wool. All his men speak of him with the greatest awe and respect.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘I do not know. They speak of him only as the Hitama, which in their language means “exalted in learning”.’

  ‘What does he seek here?’

  ‘You, Magus. He comes for you. The caravan master asked for you by name.’

  Taita was only mildly surprised. ‘What food have we? We must offer hospitality to this Hitama.’

  ‘The locusts and drought have left us with little. I have some smoked fish and enough corn for a few salt cakes.’

  ‘What of the mushrooms we collected yesterday?’

  ‘They have turned rotten and stinking. Perhaps I can find something in the village.’

  ‘No, do not trouble our friends. Life for them is hard enough already. We will make do with what we have.’ In the end they were saved by the generosity of their visitor. The Hitama accepted their invitation to share the evening meal, but he sent Meren back with a gift of a fine fat camel. It was plain that he knew how sorely the populace was suffering from the famine. Meren slaughtered the beast and prepared a roasted shoulder. The remainder of the carcass would be enough to feed the servants of the Hitama, and most of the village population.

  Taita waited for his guest on the roof of the temple. He was intrigued to discover whom he might be. His title suggested that he was one of the magi, or perhaps the abbot of some other learned sect. He had a premonition that something of great import was to be revealed to him.

  Is this the messenger who was presaged by the auguries? The one for whom I have waited so long? he wondered, then stirred as he heard Meren ushering the visitor up the wide stone staircase.

  ‘Take care with your master. The treads of the staircase are crumbling and can be dangerous,’ Meren told the bearers, who at last arrived on the roof terrace. He helped them settle the curtained litter close to Taita’s mat, then placed a silver bowl of pomegranate-flavoured sherbet and two drinking bowls on the low table between them. He glanced enquiringly at his own master. ‘What else do you wish, Magus?’

  ‘You may leave us now, Meren. I will call you when we are ready to eat.’ Taita poured a bowl of the sherbet and placed it close to the opening in the curtains, which were still tightly drawn. ‘Greetings and welcome. You bring honour to my abode,’ he murmured, speaking to his unseen guest. There was no reply and he concentrated all the power of the Inner Eye on the palanquin. He was astonished not to distinguish any aura of a living person beyond the silk curtains. Though he scanned the covered space carefully he found no sign of life. It appeared blank and sterile. ‘Is anybody there?’ He stood quickly and crossed to the litter. ‘Speak!’ He demanded. ‘What devilry is this?’

  He jerked aside the curtain, then stepped back in surprise. A man sat cross-legged on the padded bed, facing him. He wore only a saffron loincloth. His body was skeletal, his bald head skull-like, his skin as dry and wrinkled as that shed by a serpent. His countenance was as weathered as an ancient fossil, but his expression was
serene, even beautiful.

  ‘You have no aura!’ Taita exclaimed, before he could prevent the words reaching his lips.

  The Hitama inclined his head slightly. ‘Neither have you, Taita. None of those who have returned from the temple of Saraswati give out a detectable aura. We have left part of our humanity with Kashyap, the lamp-bearer. This deficiency enables us to recognize one another.’

  Taita took a while to consider these words. The Hitama had echoed what he had been told by Samana.

  ‘Kashyap is dead and a woman has taken his seat before the goddess. Her name is Samana. She told me there had been others. You are the first I have met.’

  ‘Few of us are granted the gift of the Inner Eye. Even fewer of us remain. Our numbers have been reduced. There is a sinister reason for this, which I will explain to you in due time.’ He made space on the mattress beside him. ‘Come, sit close to me, Taita. My hearing begins to fail me, and there is much to discuss, but little time is left to us.’ The visitor switched from laboured Egyptian into the arcane Tenmass of the adepts, which he spoke flawlessly. ‘We must remain discreet.’

  ‘How did you find me?’ Taita asked, in the same language, as he settled beside him.

  ‘The star led me.’ The ancient seer raised his face to the eastern sky. In the time that they had been speaking together, night had fallen and the panoply of the heavens shone forth in majesty. The Star of Lostris still hung directly overhead, but it was further altered in shape and substance. It no longer had a solid centre. It had become merely a cloud of glowing gases, blowing away in a long feather on the solar winds.

  ‘I have always been aware of my intimate connection to that star,’ Taita murmured.