'You are doing good work with them,' Nefer told Mintaka, as he stroked the mare's neck, 'but I fear they are too far gone ever to pull another chariot.'
She rounded on him fiercely: 'I will bring all of them through, I swear to the goddess. There must be hundreds more fodder bags and waterskins out there under the sand. We may have to stay here many more days, but when we leave, these gallant creatures will take us out.'
Nefer laughed at her through his cracked, scabbed lips. 'I am in deep awe of your passionate nature.'
'Then provoke me no further,' she warned him, 'or you will see more proof of it.' It was the first time she had smiled since the passing of the khamsin. 'Now go back to help the others. We cannot have too great a supply of water.'
He left her, and went down into the sands where Taita was divining further afield. Not all the Hyksos chariots were so lightly covered with sand as the ones they had first found. Many were hidden for ever beneath the high new dunes.
They moved further and further away from the rocky hillock as the search went on. Beneath the sands they found many corpses, swollen bellies stinking.
Soon they were out of earshot of where Mintaka was tending the horses like a syce.
--
The cessation of all sound roused Trok, and he groaned as he tried to move. The sand was a stifling weight upon him. It seemed to crush in his ribs and force the breath from his lungs. Nevertheless, he knew that the spot Ishtar had chosen for them to ride out the storm was, either by chance or design, a good one. In any other place they might have been buried for ever. Here he had been able to keep close to the surface of the earth. In the past days as the layers of blown sand had built up over him and the weight had become unbearable he had managed to wriggle free, leaving only enough covering him to protect him from the full abrasive force of the khamsin.
Now he struggled up towards the light and air like a diver coming up from the depths of a deep pool. As he swam up laboriously through the sand his damaged shoulder was a burning agony. He struggled on until his head, still swathed in folds of cloth, broke free. He unwrapped it and blinked about him in the dazzling light. The wind had passed but the air was luminous with fine particles of suspended dust. He rested like that for a while until the pain in his shoulder abated a little. Then he pushed aside the layer of sand that still covered his lower body and tried to call out, 'Ishtar! Where are you?' but his voice was a formless croak. He turned his head slowly and saw the Mede, sitting near him, his back to the rocky cliff face. He looked like an exhumed corpse that had been dead for days. Then Ishtar opened his one good eye.
'Water?' Trok's voice was only just intelligible, but the Mede shook his head.
'So we have survived the storm just to die in the same grave,' Trok tried to say, but no sound came out from his ravaged throat and mouth.
He lay for a while longer, and felt any instinct to survive being extinguished under the slow seep of exhaustion and resignation. It would be so much easier just to close his eyes and drift off to sleep, never to wake again. That thought spurred him and he forced open his crusted eyelids, felt the grit under the lids scraping at his eyeballs.
'Water,' he said. 'Find water.'
Using the cliff side as a support he lurched to his feet and stood there swaying, hugging his useless arm to his chest.
Ishtar watched him, his one blind eye like that of a reptile or a corpse. Trok started forward drunkenly, bumping into the cliff at every few paces he took, making his way along the base of the rock until he could look out over the desert. The dunes were pristine and unblemished, as voluptuously curved as the body of a lovely young girl.
There was no trace of men or vehicles. His fighting divisions, the finest in all Egypt, had vanished without trace. He tried to lick his lips, but there was no spittle in his chalky mouth. He felt his legs give way under him and knew that if went down he would never rise again. Using the wall of stone as a support he tottered on, not knowing where he was going and with no thought in his head but to go on.
Then he heard human voices, and knew he was hallucinating. There was silence again. He went a few steps further, stopped and listened. The voices came again. This time they were closer and clearer. He felt unexpected strength flow back into his body, but when he tried to call out no sound came from his parched throat. There was silence once more. The voices had ceased.
He started forward again, then stopped suddenly. A woman's voice, no mistaking it. A sweet, clear voice.
Mintaka. The name formed silently on his swollen lips. Then another voice. This time a man's. He could not make out the words or recognize the speaker, but if he was with Mintaka he must be one of the fugitives Trok had been pursuing. The enemy.
Trok looked down at himself. His sword-belt was gone, and his weapons with it. He was unarmed, dressed only in his tunic, which had so much sand in the weave that it chafed his skin like a hair-shirt. He looked around him for a weapon, a stick or a stone, but there was nothing. The scree had been covered by sand.
He stood undecided, and the voices came again. Mintaka and the man were in a gully among the rocks. While he still hesitated he heard the sand crunching like salt crystals under someone's feet. That person was coming down the gully towards where Trok stood.
Trok shrank back against the stone wall and a man emerged from the mouth of the gully, twenty paces from where Trok hid. The stranger set off with a determined stride into the dunes. He was strongly familiar, but recognition eluded Trok until the man turned and called back towards the gully, 'Do not tax yourself unduly, Mintaka. You have come through a trying ordeal.' Then he walked on.
Trok gaped after him. He is dead, he thought. It cannot be him. The message from Naja was clear ... He considered the possibility that a djinn or some evil spirit was impersonating the young Pharaoh Nefer Seti as he watched the young man go out into the desert. Then, through eyes bleary with sand, he saw him join three others, among them the unmistakable figure of the Warlock, who, Trok realized, must be responsible, in some strange and miraculous way, for the resurrection of Nefer Seti. But now he had neither the time nor the inclination to ponder this further. There was only one thought in his mind and that was water.
As stealthily as he could he crept forward into the gully where he had heard Mintaka's voice and peered round the corner of the cliff. He did not recognize her at first: she was as bedraggled as a peasant. Her hair and her tattered tunic were stiff with sand, and her eyes were sunken and bloodshot. She was kneeling at the head of one of a small herd of horses, holding a water bucket for it to drink.
