Desert Oath Read online

Later, the killer found the medallion in Emsaf’s belongings, and put it in his own pack.

  The mission was done, for now.

  Bion stretched and took a deep breath. He’d clean his weapons, get some rest and then report in. There he would get his next orders, a new kill to find, and the game would be afoot once more.

  3

  That day – the day our lives changed – we were sitting in our favourite spot, our backs against the warm stone of the outside of the Siwa fortress wall. I’d seen the lone rider shimmering on the horizon, but to be honest, I’d given him little thought. After all, he was little more than a speck in the distance, just another part of the day, like the water lapping the banks of the oasis beneath, or the people moving among the green of the plantations.

  Besides, I was sitting with Aya and she was talking about Alexandria, as she often did, of how she would like to return there one day. As I listened I watched the horseman reach the shores of the oasis about to make his way into the village below.

  ‘You should see it, Bayek,’ she was saying, and I pictured it as she spoke. ‘Alexandria is where the whole world meets, where every language under the sun is spoken on its streets, where Greeks and Egyptians walk together, where the Jews have their own temples even – and scholars from around the world come to study at the great Museum and Library. Will you go one day, do you think?’

  I shrugged. ‘Possibly. But my destiny lies here.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I know,’ she said sadly.

  ‘You know what else Alexander did,’ I said, to try and lighten the mood, ‘besides creating his great city, I mean? He came here, to Siwa. He came to visit the Oracle at the Temple of Amun.’

  In Siwa we had two temples. One was abandoned, but the other was like a small town-within-a-town: the Temple of Amun.

  ‘How did he get here?’ said Aya.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the story I prefer is that Alexander and his companions were in the desert, almost dying of thirst, when two serpents appeared to them and guided them out of the desert to Siwa.’

  Aya chuckled. ‘Or perhaps he just came here on a pilgrimage.’

  ‘I prefer my version.’

  ‘Ever the romantic. So, what happened while he was here?’

  ‘He visited the Oracle. Now, nobody knows exactly what the Oracle said to Alexander, but he came away from the meeting convinced that he was the son of Amun, and he went on to be crowned Pharaoh at Memphis, as well as conquering many lands.’

  ‘You think our Oracle was responsible for all that?’

  ‘I like to believe so,’ I said. ‘The point is that our Oracle at Siwa is considered infallible, our Temple of Amun is known throughout the land …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it needs protecting.’

  Her head dropped and dark hair fell in braids as she grinned. ‘And so we get back to your destiny. Tell me something, Bayek, are you really sure you want to follow in your father’s footsteps? Do you know it? Truly? Deep in your heart.’

  Which was a good question.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  We sat for a while in silence. ‘I wish I could be more like you,’ she said. ‘More … content.’

  ‘Don’t you wish it were the other way round?’ I said, testing. ‘That I were more like you?’

  The question hung. And that was how we sat for some moments more – until our friend Hepzefa came running along the path towards us.

  ‘Bayek! Bayek!’ he called, ‘A messenger from Zawty has arrived.’

  ‘What of it?’ said Aya. She sat up, our afternoon well and truly disrupted.

  ‘He came for Sabu,’ said Hepzefa breathlessly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I heard myself say.

  ‘Sabu is about to depart,’ huffed Hepzefa. ‘Your father is leaving Siwa.’

  In moments, the three of us had scrambled down from the fortress wall and made our way into the village, where residents appeared from within their homes, shielding their eyes and craning their necks to see up the lane.

  They were looking in the direction of my home.

  As we came on to the lane a woman saw me and whispered to her companion, who also looked in my direction and then quickly away again. Children ran past on their way up the hill, wanting to know what all the fuss was about. About to join the pilgrimage, I caught sight of a horseman riding against the tide and it hit me that the man I’d seen skirting the oasis was the messenger from Zawty. He was preoccupied, tucking what looked like a purse of coins into a leather satchel slung across his chest, so that when I burst forward and grabbed his horse he was almost unseated with the surprise. He cursed and rubbed at his chin.

  ‘You leave my horse be,’ he warned, fixing me with a pair of eyes the colour of lapis.

  ‘You came with a message for my father, the township’s protector. What did the message say?’

  ‘If he’s your father then I’m sure he’ll tell you.’

  I shook my head in frustration, trying another approach. ‘Answer me this instead: who sent the message?’

  The messenger pulled his horse from my grasp. ‘You’ll have to ask him that yourself also,’ he said, and with that, he left.

  Still the townsfolk made their way towards my house. From ahead a call went up for Rabiah and I knew why: she and my father were confidants, often to be found conversing in low voices away from eavesdropping ears. At town meetings the two of them always seemed to speak with one voice.

  ‘Come on,’ Hepzefa was saying, starting up the hill.

  But even though he and Aya were about to make their way up, I hung back, sure my life was soon to change and wanting to delay that moment.

  Aya turned and saw. She told Hepzefa to carry on and then came back to me, the last of the day’s sun lighting her up so that she seemed to glow as she strode the few paces between us.

  ‘Bayek,’ she said gently, putting her arms to my shoulders, finding my eyes with hers. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m …’ I started. ‘I don’t know.’

  She nodded, understanding. ‘Well, you never will unless you come and find out. Come on.’

  She leaned forward, brushing my lips with hers. ‘Be strong,’ she whispered, and took my hand, as much to offer comfort as to lead me up the path and towards the home my father was preparing to quit.

  4

  The next morning I awoke to a feeling of melancholy that seemed to permeate the air in my room. And for a moment or so, fuzzily trying to navigate that period when the real world and the world of sleep are inseparably tangled, I lay wondering what was wrong, what in my world was so strange and different all of a sudden. Until …

  I remembered.

  It all came back.

  I remembered my mother, standing with her arms folded in the dusk, her lips thinned so hard they were almost white, and her eyes afire. In the street outside our house, tethered, was my father’s horse, his bags already slung over it, and just seeing them there had brought the news closer to home, the realization hitting me like a low punch.

  When I looked at Aya she returned my gaze, eyes flecked with worry. Then my father had appeared, only to be brought up short by the sight of the townsfolk assembled there, shaking his head, continuing with his preparations. ‘Ahmose,’ he said, appealing to my mother. But if he was hoping for understanding there he received none.

  Rabiah had arrived. She and my father had exchanged whispered words, none of which seemed to satisfy Rabiah, judging by the expression she wore. She and my mother were clearly of one mind. She was shaking her head, trying to impress something on my father, but whatever it was, he paid her no heed, refusing to speak to her in the privacy of our home, insisting he needed to leave at once.

  Then he was ready. He kissed my mother and then took me in a fierce embrace, knocking the air out of me as he thumped my back goodbye.

  He mounted his horse. The crowd quietened.

  ‘You took an oath, Sabu,’ said Rabiah, but there was a calmness abo
ut her, as though accepting the turn of events.

  ‘I have taken many oaths, Rabiah,’ he said.

  ‘Who will protect Siwa now?’ called a voice from the crowd.

  ‘Without me here, you’ll need a lot less protection,’ he called back, and with that he drew his horse around and set off, choosing a path through the townsfolk and heading towards the oasis and away from Siwa.

  I remembered the sound of his horse’s hooves as he made his way down the path towards the plantations, townsfolk lining the route to watch him go, some of them trying to puzzle out what he’d said; I remembered trying to make sense of my feelings as he became a dot in the distance, but I couldn’t do it then. As I lifted my head from the headrest and gazed around my room as though it were an unfamiliar place, I found I could not do it now, either.

  Mother was already up. She’d taken a beaker of water to the back of our house, where young fig trees grew along the walls, their upper branches providing a canopy through which morning sun dappled the small courtyard. She sat with her legs drawn up, linen stretched across her knees, beaker held so loosely it looked in danger of dropping from her fingers. And though she smiled up at me as I arrived and took a seat beside her, her smile was a little wan, and I wondered how much sleep she’d had.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘And what about us?’

  She gave a short dry laugh. ‘Oh, life goes on. You just wait, we’ll just be getting accustomed to life without him and he’ll turn up again and throw us all into disarray.’

  ‘Why did he leave, though?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. I saw worry in his eyes.’

  ‘Was it something to do with Menna?’

  Her gaze hardened with memory. She sank into her thoughts and I kept her company, letting her reflect. Finally, she shook her head.

  ‘What difference if it was?’

  ‘It would make sense, at least.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, and raised the beaker to her lips, then placed it to the step. ‘Well, in that case you should probably go and see Rabiah.’

  5

  My father was the man who had defeated the tomb-robber Menna. Only the gods knew how much I’d had that particular fact drummed into me. By everyone in the village. Constantly.

  Who was Menna? Good question. Some said that there was no such man; that ‘Menna’ was in fact several people, or simply the name of a highly organized gang of men who maintained the illusion of a sinister figurehead in order to spread fear.

  Others said that Menna was indeed a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood person, but not in fact an active member of his own gang. They said he was a man grown fat and rich from the work of his minions and that he controlled his operation without once leaving the courtyards of his palatial home in Alexandria.

  The most persistent rumour, and the one we talked of most on the streets of Siwa growing up, was that Menna was real, and that he ruled over his gang with a potent mix of fear and the promise of great riches in store. They said his teeth were taken from his victims, wired together, painted black and sharpened, and that they admirably performed their job of inspiring fear in all who set eyes upon him; that he was cruel and ruthless and worshipped no god but money. They said he would kill those he could not bribe and anyone who defied him – he would kill them and he would kill their families and hang their entrails in trees and their skinned corpses in public squares as a warning to those who defied him.

  They said he was a demon, sent by the gods to punish the wicked, torment the innocent.

  That’s how evil he was.

  Whatever the truth, Menna and his gang had stayed several steps ahead of the soldiers who were constantly in pursuit. Every now and then one of his men would be captured, tortured and burned alive in retribution, so that his body would be denied the journey into the afterlife, desecrated, just as he himself had desecrated so many burial grounds.

  Not that it stopped them. The one unbribable official who had attempted to do so had failed, and then soon mysteriously died. No amount of intervention suppressed Menna’s activities, and despite the torture visited upon his cohorts, none had ever revealed his identity or whereabouts. Everyone feared him.

  I was much smaller, perhaps just ten years old, when Menna and his men were most active. When I first became aware of them they were little more than a story, a fable. They existed purely as a topic of conversation between my mother and father, and thus in my imagination late at night, when I lay in bed trying to sleep.

  What I learned was that the gang had been moving throughout the north. They had been raiding pyramids, of course, but also casting their net wider. It was thanks to tomb-robbers like Menna that the pharaohs’ architects had begun to add more traps and dead ends to their burial sites, which were like a burning beacon to those who made a living stealing possessions that the dead planned to take to the afterlife. Even the rich who were now buried in huge secret vaults, tombs built into rock, were not safe from his depredations. But his favourite targets were those less wealthy yet not poor, who would begin their passage to the next life in a necropolis, a burial ground situated close to a settlement. It was upon these that Menna preyed.

  He had a method. Posing as traders, his gang would set up camp within striking distance of his target, but not too close. From there they would go to work infiltrating the local community and bribing officials, as well as surveying tombs, taking note of their tunnels and working on ways to avoid any traps that had been set.

  His methods would change depending on the nature of the burial ground, but he was in the habit of breaking into tombs and simply taking everything away. That way, the thieves could just disappear quickly, and sort out the gold from the gimcrack later, in the safety of their lairs.

  All of which, of course, had brought him to the attention of my father, who, as Siwa’s protector – the town mekety – had made it his business to know when Menna and his gang were close.

  And at that particular time, they were very close.

  6

  Rabiah wasn’t home. I took a seat at the front of her house and settled down to wait, resenting every passing second, until at last I caught sight of her, ambling slowly up the path towards home with a basket of fruit from the market.

  ‘I wondered if I might see you today,’ she said, moving past with little in the way of warmth or greeting. I followed her inside without being asked, waiting as she cast off her cloak and set down her basket, and then submitting to her as she stood with her arms folded, appraising me for an uncomfortably long time.

  A little older than my mother, Rabiah was nevertheless similar in temperament: neither was the type to mince their words (‘I’m direct, and there’s nothing wrong in that,’ my mother used to say whenever my father chided her for plain-speaking) and they both had a habit of making you feel as though they could see right through you.

  And right now, that was exactly how I felt.

  ‘I see determination,’ she said, when at last the inspection was over. ‘That’s good. That’s what we like to see from the blood of the Siwa protector. Perhaps you hope to take up the mantle presently, do you, now that your father’s gone?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said carefully, wondering what she was leading to.

  ‘How close were you to doing so, do you think?’ she asked. Her face was unreadable, eyes slightly hooded.

  ‘I have learned a great deal from him – about the art of survival and combat.’

  ‘Survival,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you learn that from the Nubian?’

  The Nubians had been camped on the outskirts of the township when I was younger. I’d been friends with a girl, Khensa, who, despite being younger than me, had taught me much about hunting and trapping. Later I discovered that Khensa had taught me these things at the behest of my mother, who considered the Nubians to be the very best in such matters.

  ‘Yes,’ I told Rabiah now. ‘But when the Nubians left wa
s when my father took over my training himself. Only he could tutor me in the ways of combat and protectorship.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Rabiah. ‘And how has your training progressed?’

  She fixed her gaze on me, and I felt as if she were able to see inside my head and read my thoughts, because it was true that for some reason my training had proceeded slowly, my father seemingly reluctant at every turn. Rabiah and my mother pushed and pushed for him to train me, yet each step was preceded by some variation of ‘You’re not ready yet, Bayek.’

  Yes, I was aware that my training would take years – ‘a lifetime, Bayek’ was something else I heard a great deal – but even so: it felt to me as though from the age of six, when my training began, until now, at fifteen, I had made barely any progress at all.

  And now it seemed Rabiah thought the same. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘do you think that your training should have progressed further than it has?’

  My head dropped. ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

  ‘Quite,’ she said, smiling. ‘And why do you suppose your father hasn’t taken you the full way? Why is your training so far from completion?’

  ‘I would dearly like to know,’ I told her. ‘Is it something to do with my friendship with Aya?’

  ‘Friendship,’ she chuckled, ‘that’s a good one. Friendship. I’ve seen the two of you together, like limpets on the hull of a boat. What chance enlightenment in the ways of custodianship when it has young love to contend with, eh?’

  I felt myself colour and Rabiah grinned, which only increased my discomfort. ‘If he made you think it was about your friendship with Aya, he was trying to hide the real reason. I know this. There was something else, I am sure. Some other reason. Tell me, what do you remember of the night Menna struck?’

  ‘So it is something to do with Menna?’

  ‘My question first. What do you remember of that night?’

  I looked at her. I had been only around six years old, but I still remembered every moment.