The Age of Ra

''I am,'' I said. ''I'll do whatever it takes. Even though you aren't my national deity, I will serve you.''

''You say that. You'll need to prove it.''

And off he went again.

And the following morning, would you believe it, a wave came along and threw a big old shoal of sardines up onto the rocks, and most of them flopped and flipped themselves back into the sea, but a couple of dozen were left stranded there, high and dry, gasping their last, and I gathered them up and ate one raw and laid the rest out to cook in the sun, because those rocks could get as hot as a griddle, and bingo, within an hour or so I was snacking down on baked sardine flesh and it was sweet and juicy and my mouth's watering even now at the memory of it.

Third dream. He was back.

''Give me a few years of your life,'' he said, ''and in return I will give you power. Power over men. I will make you as close to a deity as any mortal may get. But the condition is that you must work for me. You must act according to my wishes. Your time will not be your own. Your every waking hour will be spent pursuing my goals. Do this, and when you have finished you will be free. Free to pursue your life as before.''

As bargains go, it didn't seem a bad one. Not that I was in any position to haggle. It was clearly a take-it-or- leave-it arrangement, and since leaving it meant dying a slow horrible death and taking it meant survival, what else was I going to do? Already he'd proved himself with the rainfall and the sardines. He'd shown me he meant what he said. He was serious.

''It will not be pleasant,'' he added. ''I will be bestowing a minuscule portion of my essence on you, and make no mistake, it will hurt. The mortal frame was not designed to be a receptacle for such power. In order to fit you for it, you will first need to be broken in… toughened.''

''I can handle it,'' I told him. ''When do we start?''

''Now,'' he said, and…

He thrust into me. That's the only word I can think of. Thrust his ba into me. There's no other way of putting it. It wasn't gentle. It wasn't subtle. It was like… I was crouching there on those rocks and there was this enormous, penetrating, agonising influx of… of force. Sudden, and overwhelming. My mind went blank, as though every fuse in my body had blown. I remember waking up, screaming. Clawing at the rocks. Blood trickling from my mouth because I'd bitten my tongue and from my nose because I don't know why. Everything hurt. I was tingling all over, and not in a nice way. Like pins and needles times a hundred. All I could do was lie there sobbing. The pain faded after about an hour, but the sense of intrusion — violation — didn't. I felt… different. Changed. Strange inside. I couldn't put my finger on how, precisely. I just knew I was no longer who I had been.

It happened again, next time I slept. And again. And again. I came to dread closing my eyes, knowing what was to come. But I knew I had to endure it. This was all part of the deal. The receiving of power. The breaking-in. The toughening. And it didn't get any easier with repetition. Each time, in fact, it was worse. More painful. More humiliating. Each time, I was left feeling raw and used and a little less the person I used to be. Degraded. As though the old Steven, happy-go-lucky Steven, irreverent and impulsive Steven, was getting seared away layer by layer, to allow this new thing into me, the Steven I was to become.

Rain showers provided me with drinking water, just enough of it when I needed it. I soon had the strength and the mental wherewithal to lie on the rocks by the sea and catch fish with my bare hands. It's not an easy skill to master, since the angle of refraction through the water makes things look like they're somewhere when actually they're just to the side of that, but I found that if I dipped my hands under the surface and held them there long enough, the fish stopped being suspicious and swam close enough to grab. I even managed to haul out a lobster once.

Five and a half weeks I lived like that. Forty days and nights. I kept track of the time like prisoners do, scratching marks on a rock in batches of five. By the end, my uniform was in tatters, just rags hanging off me. I had a hermit's hair and beard. I was skeletal, and tottery on my pins, and stank like a cesspit.

But I had power. It thrummed inside me, the god's gift. Gift? No, I earned it. It wasn't handed to me. I paid for it, every bit of it, with suffering.

On the last night, the fortieth night, the god told me he was done with me. He had infused me with as much of his essence as I'd need.

''With this power,'' he said, ''you will be able to bend people to your will. They will cede authority over themselves to you, and do it voluntarily, bowing to you in the same instinctive way that they do to the gods. You will not be able to make anyone do anything that goes against the grain of their own wishes. By speaking to them in the right way, however, with coaxing words and wily flattery, you will be able to mould their wishes to match yours.''

What I had now, in other words, was the silverest of silver tongues.

''You will also,'' the god went on, ''be invisible to the rest of the Pantheon. You will be able to carry out your work in secret, without fear of their intervention.''

In other words, he'd made me the human equivalent of a ba-infused amulet. Instead of priests, I was a blur to the gods.

''But,'' he said, ''you must use these abilities only to further my ends, and in order to ensure you keep to that, I am going to mark you. Mark you in such a way that there is never any doubt who is your master. Hide the mark from others by all means, but you will always know it is there and you will not be able to avoid it. Every time you look at your own reflection, the mark will look back at you. Others may not recognise it for what it is. Some may take it for just an unfortunate scar. But you will know, and I will know, and it will signify the compact we have sealed.''

Like I said last time, I had been hit in the face by shrapnel from the exploding Immortal. I had had my face damaged. But the god took that damage and transformed it. The scarring twisted and reshaped itself into what you see before you now. I felt it happen, and it hurt too, surprise, surprise.

Dawn the next day, a fishing boat was pulling up to anchor beside the island. I staggered down to it. A Greek fisherman was urinating over the guardrail. Iannis.

I told him to take me off the island. It was the very first time I exercised my power. I spoke commandingly, as a god would. Iannis agreed instantly that I could hitch a ride on his boat. We set off, and I never once looked back. I kept my face turned away from the island till I knew it was safely out of sight. That fucking place… I still have nightmares about it, you know. Every now and again I dream I'm stuck there and will never get off and everything that's happened since, that's the dream. In reality, I'm dying there on those rocks, fantasising the next few years of my life. All this, the chair I'm sitting on, the room we're in, you, Dave — it doesn't exist. Bizarre, eh?

From then on, the story goes much as I told you. I stayed with Iannis and did the drug-running thing with him and all that, in order to give myself time to recover from my ordeal and plot and think and scheme. I knew what the god wanted from me. I just had to figure out how to bring it about in the most effective fashion.

Freegypt was the obvious place to set up shop. There, apathy towards the Pantheon was a way of life, and apathy can be turned into antipathy without much effort, like sharpening a blunt pencil. Plus, with all the militias and infighting in Upper Freegypt, they had the ready-made raw material for an army. I formulated a plan. Learn Arabic. Then create an image for myself. The mask was obligatory, to disguise the god's mark. I'd tried growing a beard but it didn't really work. Didn't obscure enough of the scarring. Also, if I wore a mask that covered my face completely it would make me a blank canvas, something people could project their own dreams and ideals onto. I'd be both less of a man with it, and more. And the name? That just popped into my head one morning. Al Ashraqa. He who brightens. The Lightbringer. Why not? It summed up what I was pretending to do, bring illumination to a benighted world. Kind of arrogant, I appreciate, but then I saw the Lightbringer as quite an arrogant character. People like arrogance in a leader, anyway. They're drawn to it. They want a leader to have certainty and guts and ambition.

And the Lightbringer had those — has those — in abundance.

''Pretending,'' said David. ''Pretending to bring illumination to the world.''

''Yes.''

''You're a fraud. This whole 'crusade' of yours — nothing but a sham.''