The Age of Ra

ratings from the Immortal, but they weren't much for company and we soon went our separate ways. Otherwise, alone.

I became aware of the left side of my face feeling odd. Tight. Stretched. Painful in a dull, tingly kind of way. I tried touching it to find out what was the matter but my fingers were numb. Been in the water so long they'd lost all sensitivity. I guessed I'd struck something or been struck by something, debris perhaps, and my face was swollen and bruised.

Night came. Rain started to fall — great hissing sheets of it. I lay there floating, thinking maybe I should try and make the effort to swim. But swim where? Which way? It would be a waste of energy. If I conserved my strength instead, I might just stay alive that little bit longer. I was probably in a current and the current would be taking me somewhere, maybe to land, maybe further out to sea. Whichever it was, swimming wasn't going to make a gnat's fart of difference. So I just hung there, suspended in the water, the rain rattling down on my head, drumming on the roof of my skull.

I'm not ashamed to admit I bawled like a baby several times during the first part of that night. I was lost and terrified, and the rain was doing what the sea couldn't and half-drowning me. I longed to be home, safe and dry, and see you again, and Mum, and even Dad. I'd have given anything for a chance to be with my family, everyone on good terms with everyone else, all differences set aside, forgiven, forgotten, a clean slate.

The rain stopped around midnight, I'd say. The sky cleared. The stars came out. By that point the pain from my face had faded, I couldn't feel my limbs at all, and I was shivering uncontrollably. Exposure, hypothermia, delayed shock — I knew I was suffering from any or all of them, and I knew, no two ways about it, I was going to die.

But the stars, Dave… I couldn't stop gazing up at them. They were so beautiful and so many. I identified the constellations. Astronomy was about the only lesson I ever paid any attention in at school. I knew all the names, both the old Roman ones and the modern ones. Orion's Belt, for instance, which we now call the Three Pyramids, with the Milky Way representing the Nile. And Draco, a.k.a. the Crocodile. And Leo, the Sphinx. They glittered above me and somehow it was hugely reassuring. Not in any spiritual way, just the fact that there were so many stars up there, so many millions of them. And here was little me down here, on my own, with just hours to live, if that, and the stars were sparing a fraction of their light to create this rich, brilliant display in the heavens, and they were doing it for me, that's how it seemed. I felt I was the only person who was appreciating or had ever appreciated the show they were putting on, and I was determined to enjoy it for as long, or as little, as I had left.

That was when I first began to sense it: the size, the scale, the scope of the universe. Staring up at the stars, I had an inkling of something significant. I'm going to use a Christian term here: epiphany. It's fallen into disuse but it fits better than any other word I can think of. Epiphany.

Our physics teacher, what was his name? Him with the stammer and the lick-and-spit comb-over. Perkins. Mr Perkins. ''Puh-Puh-Puh-Perkins'', as we used to call him. To his face. Fuck, we were cruel. He once said that the universe isn't just big, it's infinite. There's no measuring it. There's no way of quantifying everything it contains. You just have to accept that it goes on forever and is mostly full of nothing.

''A buh-buh-buh-bit like your head, Westwynter Minor,'' he added. The old wuh-wuh-wisecracker.

But it didn't seem empty to me then, the universe. Quite the opposite. It was full. Jam-packed with stars, and each of those stars a sun like our own. And our sun is Ra, we all know that. Science tells us it's a gigantic ball of burning matter, an explosion in the sky. But it's also a physical manifestation of Ra's essence. His ba suffuses it and makes it shine. Without him animating it, the sun would cease to be. That's what we know. That's what we're led to believe. Those are reconciled facts.

But what about all those other stars? Is there a Ra for each of them?

If so, then our Ra is only one of an uncountable number of other supreme deities.

If not, then Ra is just a single supreme deity in one remote corner of a vast, unending nothingness.

Meaning, one way or the other, Ra is less than we think. Far less.

He is, in fact, insignificant, and so by definition are all his descendants.

Those were my thoughts. It was barely an idea, more the preliminary sketch for an idea. But still it struck me as being profound and extraordinarily powerful.

Not that I stood to gain anything by it. What use is enlightenment when your life is zooming to a close?

The stars wheeled giddyingly, and I blacked out.

When I came to, I was on a beach. It was morning. The sun was hot on my back. I had sand up my nose and I was being bitten all over by sand flies.

I wobbled upright. My face, the left side of it, was agony. I felt sick and thirsty. I had a headache like you wouldn't believe, a right royal brain-splitter. I've never been in worse shape.

But — ecstasy.

I was alive.

I was fucking well alive!

Turned out I'd washed up on one of the hundreds of islands that dot that part of the Aegean. It was a tiny knob of land jutting up from the sea, probably smaller in surface area than Courtdene, which is, what, the whole estate, a hundred acres? You could have walked around its perimeter in less than an hour, not that that was possible. Most of the shoreline was steep, jagged rocks forming coves and crags, especially on the windward side. It had one sandy beach, though, the one I'd woken up on, and a couple of pebbly ones.

It also had wild olive groves. And a freshwater stream that ran down in a series of falls and eddying pools. And a colony of rabbits. And a small, smooth-floored cave.

It had, in other words, everything a person could need in order to survive. Food. Water. Shelter.

And survive is what I did on that island, for the best part of six weeks. It was the most remarkable stroke of good fortune winding up where I did, and I took full advantage of it. I'd been as good as dead, and now through some fluke of wind and tide I found myself in a place with enough in the way of natural resources for a subsistence level of living. How had the olive trees come to grow there? Seeds carried by birds or the ocean currents, I suppose. Where had the rabbits come from? Perhaps a pet, a pregnant doe, had survived a shipwreck. Or perhaps it was simply the case that once in the dim and distant past the island had had human inhabitants and the olives and the rabbits were their legacy. I didn't know. I don't know. I didn't want to probe the matter too deeply, either. I was scared that if I started questioning the origin of these amenities, they might just, you know, vanish in a puff of smoke. Gift-horses and mouths and all that.

Six weeks of Robinson Crusoe, and I won't pretend it wasn't hard. The worst of it was my face. I'd figured out that it had got burnt, scorched when Immortal's bow end blew up. I couldn't tell how badly, though. I had no mirror, and the stream and the sea weren't able to provide a smooth enough reflection to check. My fingers explored blisters and wet sore patches and could feel the heat of inflammation, not to mention scrubby bits on my scalp where the hair was gone, but unless you can actually see your injuries for yourself, it's hard to know the full extent of them. It's all a bit hypothetical. I imagined terrible scarring and equally I imagined mild singeing. The only treatment I could think of was bathing the affected area in salt water, so day after day, every couple of hours or so, I'd kneel in the shallows and rinse my face. Never pleasant. Fucking horrible, in fact. But it began to do the trick. Gradually it hurt less each time. The inflammation went down. The sores healed up. But the damage had been done and was, I knew, permanent.

Catching and eating the rabbits wasn't much of a problem. The buggers were as tame as anything. They'd lived there for generations without a natural predator, so they would come lolloping up to me when I approached, more or less ready to sniff my hand. Then — grab, hold, twist, snap neck. Easy peasy. And they never learned, the stupid things. Never got wise. Every time I went up to their warren, another bunny would hop trustingly forward and offer itself as lunch.

I'd skin 'em and gut 'em with a sharp stone, then lay the meat out on a rock to cure in the sun. It wasn't delicious but it wasn't the worst meal I'd had either. Ship's food could be a damn sight less tasty.

And olives; never my favourite vegetable, or is it fruit? But they were edible and filled a hole. Mind you, after a steady diet of them for six weeks I never want to touch one again as long as I live.

It was bearable, though, that was the thing. I knew I could stick it out, this whole ordeal, because I was convinced I was going to be found and rescued. I never had any doubt about that. It wasn't as though I was stuck on a coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific, after all. I was on an island in the Aegean, in one of the busiest parts of the Aegean what's more, an area laced with shipping lanes. Time and again I saw ships pass by, freighters, tankers, ferries, too far away to spot me, certainly too far away to be hailed, not that that stopped me from trying