remember him in your prayers to the great god Horus. He has sent you a generous L'ift 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
