As it rose higher in the sky, the sun turned baking. Lucas rattled out some orders and we stopped for refreshments and what I took, by the spreading of rugs, to be a longish rest. The water looked clean enough – not that I was inclined by now to fuss over anything I was given to drink. More welcome were the hooded cloaks the men had tied over me and Martin. Back in Alexandria, I’d seen some nasty cases of sunburn on northern slaves. I’d made sure to limit my own exposure there. Now we were further south and in the desert. In places like Jarrow, the sun is a welcome friend. At all times in Egypt, it can be the most terrible enemy.
‘So you really don’t think we’re to be killed?’ Martin whispered back when I’d finally trailed off from my mixture of apologies and reassurance. ‘You know I’m not brave like you. But I understand when the Will of God is made manifest. What must happen will happen. I was told many years ago that I’d be dead before my thirty-second birthday. That will be next month.’ He groaned loudly and pushed his head between his legs. By the look of him, it didn’t surprise me he was thinking of death.
But thirty-two? With his bald patch peeling under that hood, and his puffy face, I’d forgotten he wasn’t somewhat older. But that was a secondary point. As with Priscus a few days before, I found myself wondering how to begin reasoning with a view of things so systematically perverse. This wasn’t the time or place to talk about the mad old woman who’d told me outside Richborough I’d be dead within ten days. That was when I was twelve. But Martin hadn’t finished yet.
‘If God chooses in His Infinite Mercy to spare me,’ he added, ‘it will be because He truly has reserved you for some greater work, and that I am needed to assist. That must be our only hope.’ I left him to his renewed praying and munched on the unleavened bread one of the men had tossed in my direction. Sad to say, it was the tastiest thing I’d eaten in days.
‘I trust you are enjoying your view of the real Egypt,’ Lucas said. He stood over me, not bothering to squint in the sun that shone straight on him. The rather fussy official I’d met in Bolbitine was a fading memory. He strutted before me now, almost blazing with hatred and triumph.
‘My dear Lucas,’ I said, smiling up at him, ‘would it be worth – even at this late stage – offering you a bribe? I’m sure I could get you a promotion within the Imperial Postal Service. Captain Second Class might suit your abilities.’
‘My true name, be aware, is not Lucas,’ he said, the sarcasm lost on him. A shame this, as anger can unlock the most cautious tongues. And it was – you’ll agree – a matter of some importance to get whatever information could be had. ‘I am known among the discerning – and shall be acknowledged by all when the Greeks are driven out – as Meriamen Usermaatre Setepenre.’
‘Well,’ I said, still smiling into his lunatic eyes, ‘that’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? I’ll bet your father called you something much closer to Lucas than to that. I hope you’ll not mind if I go on calling you Lucas.’
‘The name has been corrupted by the Greeks – as is their way with all names foreign to them – into Ozymandias,’ he said with a scowl. ‘Perhaps you have heard of him.’
Of course I’d heard of Ozymandias, the Egyptian King of Kings. ‘Isn’t he the one,’ I asked with mock reverence, ‘whose name is tattooed above every arsehole in the Brotherhood? You surely chose well!’
‘You are not a Greek,’ Lucas said, still refusing to be drawn, ‘yet you side with them. Have they not also been a sore trial to your people?’
‘And why do you side against them?’ I asked, turning the question. ‘Why all these woggy airs and graces when you can almost pass for a civilised man?’
I’d finally got to him. Just as he was about to let rip, though, there was another commotion behind him.
‘Oh dear’ – I nodded at the bearded figure coming towards us – ‘it seems your followers are getting uppity again. Do you suppose another flogging might be needed to put them in order?’
With a scowl, he turned away. I was right. It was another argument. I had no idea what was going on. But the servile manner those men had shown Lucas at the landing had been turning sour. Now, with the Nile behind us, Lucas was having to insist on his authority at almost every step.
Yes, we were now headed away from the Nile. Once we’d slept through its worst heat, the sun was before us, though very slightly to our left. We were heading west. At some point, we turned south-west, and then south. All the time, we were pressing further and further into the outermost desert. As with the Nile, I hadn’t done a very good job of imagining this. I’d thought of it as rather like the prettier beaches you get on the Mediterranean shore: all flat, white sand, but much more of it. My first impression was of a great and rather scary ugliness. We were on a sort of road that snaked off into the far distance. On either side of us, low hills of jagged rock rose and fell in undulations that stretched again as far as the eye could see. Here and there were patches of what might have been dead weed, or weed that had somehow managed to survive at a low level of growth.
As for the sand, I think it’s best described as an accumulation of very fine dust. It fills up the spaces between the rocks, and is stirred into almost invisible but choking clouds at every breeze or other disturbance of the air. I got my first real lungful of the stuff some time in the latish afternoon. As we rounded a bend in the road, we came upon a group of the desert nomads you find all over those parts. We’d been hidden from each other by one of those low hills. Now, we came in full view. In white robes that covered their bodies, dark bands securing the scarves on their heads, they sat still as stone on their camels. They watched our approach. Then, as they came within hailing distance, they wheeled suddenly about and were off.
That was when I saw for the first time how fast camels could move. The ones I’d seen in Constantinople had shambled round the Circus with bundles of heavy swords heaped on their backs. Our own party had so far gone at a steady trot. These nomads, though, could get up the sort of speed you see in horses only at full pelt over level ground – and they were off the road and on stony ground. One moment, they were sitting watching us. The next, it seemed, they were a vanishing blur in the distance.
All that remained was the cloud of dust that drifted towards us, and that I breathed straight in. I nearly fell off the camel with my choking fit. I coughed. I sneezed. Tears ran down my face. I couldn’t breathe. If I’d breathed in freshly ground pepper, it wouldn’t have burned and paralysed so. And all around me, I heard the high-pitched giggling that passes, even with grown men, among the Eastern races for laughter.
‘Drink this,’ said Lucas, riding beside me. He raised his leather water sack and let a small trickle fall into my mouth. ‘Rinse and spit,’ he said curtly. The next trickle was a little more generous. It was becoming clear that water out here was not for quenching any but the most pressing thirst. I strained to remember the maps Hermogenes had shown me a few days before. Assume we were just north of Letopolis when Lucas had dropped his Imperial service act. Assume perhaps another twenty miles north, and now ten miles west. That would put us on the road to Siwa.
Most likely, we weren’t going all the way to Siwa, but were headed into an area that I knew was thick with tombs and temples put up during the Old Faith. Here seemed as good a place as any for a Brotherhood encampment. It would have to be pretty far out into the desert, though, if water was being this strictly rationed. We might be another day on this road. At some point, I realised, we’d be passing Soteropolis. It wouldn’t be quite the visit there I’d had in mind.
Chapter 20
We stopped once more in the late afternoon. I thought at first we were to pack up for the night. Martin looked ready to die again, and I was now hurting all over. But I soon realised this was just another pause in what was turning into an endless journey into the desert. We’d come to a mostly fallen-down building of mud brick. While his men squatted, all looking remarkably glum, Lucas stood on a little mound of stones and packed sand. He took in a deep breath and called something out in a rhythmical and even a somewhat liturgical chant. He called out once without any response. As he was going through the whole chant again, an old man shambled into sight. I think he’d been sleeping in a hole in the ground. He’d been asleep, I could be sure. He was blinking about in the now moderate light as if it had still been the high noon of the desert.
‘Some desert hermit,’ I told myself. Perhaps it was time for a blessing of the Brotherhood’s efforts in rounding me up for the completion of whatever it was Leontius had put in everyone’s mind regarding me. But, no. I looked harder at the old man. He was bald enough and shrivelled enough for someone who’d left the baths and company of civilisation behind so he could seek the Love of Jesus Christ. But the pattern on his tattered robe, and the hooped cross in his hand, told me this was one of the priests of the Old Faith.
