The arrow felt the breeze also and veered perceptibly in flight. It dropped towards the target, and struck three hands' breadth to the leeward side of the red bullseye.
'Seth vomit on this treacherous wind!' Nefer swore.
'The light arrow feels it more,' Taita said, and walked back to the little cart that carried the spare bows and the quivers. He came back with a long bundle wrapped in a leather sheath.
'No!' Nefer said, as he unwrapped Trok's great war bow. 'It outdoes me!'
'When did you last attempt to draw it?' Taita asked.
'On the day we unearthed it,' Nefer replied. 'You should know. You were there.'
'That was six months ago.' Taita said, and glanced significantly at Nefer's bare chest and arms. The muscles had grown hard as carved cedarwood. He handed the bow to him.
Reluctantly Nefer took it and turned it in his hands. He saw that the stock had been rebound recently with fine electrum wire and lacquered. The bowstring was new - the sinews of a lion's forelegs, cured and twisted until they were hard and unyielding as bronze.
The refusal rose to his lips again but did not pass them for Taita was watching him. He lifted the bow and, without an arrow in place, raised it and tried to draw. It came back half a cubit, then his arms locked and although the muscles flattened and hardened across his chest it would move no further. Carefully Nefer released the pressure and the bow stock returned to rest.
'Let me have it back.' Taita reached out to take the weapon from him. 'You have neither the strength nor the determination.'
Nefer jerked it away from him, and his lips went thin and white, his eyes blazed.
'You don't know everything, old man, even though you think you do.'
He reached into the cart and snatched one of the long heavy arrows from the quiver that carried the cartouche of Trok embossed in the polished leather. Like the bow it had been salvaged from the buried chariot. He strode back to the firing-line and took his stance. He nocked the arrow. His chest swelled as he sucked in a full breath. His jaw clenched and he began the draw. It came back slowly at first and reached the median line. He grunted and his breath hissed out through his throat, the muscles in his arms stood proud and hard and he came back to the full draw, kissing the bowstring like a lover. In the same movement he loosed, and the heavy arrow leaped away, singing against the blue, made its noon and dropped, flying high over the line of targets, going on and on, twice the distance. Then the flint head struck a bright spur of sparks from a distant rock and the shaft snapped with the terrible power of the strike.
Nefer stared after the arrow in astonishment, and Taita murmured, 'Perhaps you are right.'
Nefer dropped the bow and embraced him. 'You know enough, Old Father,' he said. 'Enough for all of us.'
--
Taita took Nefer and Meren into the desert, three days' travel through the harsh and beautiful land. He led them to the hidden valley where the black liquid oozed to the surface through a deep cleft in the rock. This was the same thick, tarry substance that they had used to set alight the jackals' fur on the night raid at Thane.
They filled the clay pots they had brought with them and returned to the workshop at Gallala. Taita refined the black liquid, boiling it down over a slow fire until it felt slippery as fine silk between the fingers. 'It will lubricate the wheel hubs smoother and longer than clarified pigs lard, or any other concoction. It will give you an advantage of fifty paces in a thousand. Perhaps the difference between success or failure, or even life and death.'
Nefer was inclined to run the royal chariot on the Red Road, but Taita asked, 'Do you really want to ride in a golden sarcophagus?'
'The goldwork weighs only two taels. You weighed it yourself.'
'It might just as well be two hundred when you go out there.'
Taita went over every one of the one hundred and five chariots they had exhumed from the sands, selected ten and stripped them down. He weighed the chassis and tested the strength of the joints in the carriagework. He spun the wheels on their hubs, judging by eye the slightest wobble in their rotation. At last he made his final choice.
He modified the hub assembly on the chosen vehicle so that the wheels were held by a single bronze pin that could be removed with a mallet blow. When he reassembled the chariot he discarded the dashboard and side panels, ridding it of every last tael of superfluous weight. Without the support of the struts and panels the riders would have to rely on their own sense of balance and a single loop of rope spliced to the footplate to steady themselves over the roughest ground. Finally he lubricated the wheel hubs with the black grease from the desert well.
Under Taita's supervision, they went over the harness an inch at a time, and Mintaka, Merykara and their maids sat up late into the night stitching and double stitching the joins and seams.
Then they chose the weapons they would carry, rolling the javelins and the arrows to detect any imperfection, suspending them on the special balance board Taita had designed, adding a bead of lead at haft or head until they were perfect. They sharpened the points so they would bite and hold in the targets. They resoled their sandals and filed the bronze cleats into spikes. They shaped new leather guards to protect their forearms from the whip of the bowstring and the javelin thong. They selected three swords each, for the bronze blades often snapped in the heat of combat. They sharpened the edges then burnished them with powdered pumice stone until they could shave the hair from their own forearms.
They cured and twisted spare bowstrings, to be carried as belts tied around their waists. Other than leather helmets and jerkins, they would wear no armour on the road, to lighten the load that Dov and Krus must draw. They worked behind the locked doors of the workshop, so that no others would learn of their preparations.
But above all else they trained and practised, built up their strength and stamina, and the trust of the horses.
For Dov and Krus the fire would be the worst of the ordeal. They built their own fires out in the desert, stacking faggots of wood and bundles of dry straw. They let the horses see the flames and smell the smoke, then blindfolded them. Though at first Krus balked and whinnied with terror, in the end he would run blind, trusting the man upon his back, so close to the crackling flames that they singed his mane.
