knew that the loser of an argument is the one who starts shouting first. Martin, I had no doubt, was praying the earth would cut out the middleman and swallow him up without pain. I smiled up happily, waiting for the spasm of rage to pass.
‘You lie!’ Lucas snarled as he brought his voice under control. ‘When I – the second, and the greater Meriamen Usermaatre Setepenre – put on the double crown of Egypt and-’
‘Oh, so that’s your plan, is it, Lucas?’ I cut in, still smiling happily. I’d got him at last. ‘Cupbearer won’t be good enough for you in this new order of things. You want the cup carried straight to your own lips. Well, I wonder if the Elders of your Brotherhood know about that?’
He was silent now, though breathing very heavily and fighting to keep control. I leaned over to one side and looked round him.
‘If it pleases Your Majesty,’ I said, with another look up at his sweating, hate-contorted face, ‘two of your subjects are coming to blows over who gets first use of the shit shovel. Why don’t you go and offer yourself as judge in their dispute. I can’t pronounce the stupid wog name you’ve given yourself. But you come back other than covered in their shit, and I’ll hail you as King Arsehole the First, the New and greater Solomon.
‘And so my faith is that of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour,’ I said loudly as a couple of his men came closer to try to follow what we’d been arguing about. ‘Mine is the faith that was born in Bethlehem and made glorious in Jerusalem.’ I carried on, throwing in as many names and places as seemed relevant. ‘And I utterly abjure the Satanic names of Isis, Horus, Sekhmet and all the other demons from Hell.’
Lucas stared at me as if I were the one who’d lost his wits. But his men looked on thoughtfully.
Chapter 21
‘Aelric, have you gone mad?’ Martin wailed softly once we were alone. ‘Are you trying to get us killed?’
‘Shut up!’ I hissed. ‘And do try to keep a stiff upper lip in front of these wogs.’ I ignored his jabbering reply and kicked him hard on the shin. ‘Look, Martin, they’ve got us trussed up like slaves brought to market. Only one of them understands any language that we know, and he’s mad. Meek obedience will get us nowhere. Pleading for mercy won’t work either. We’re already God knows where. Tomorrow, we’ll be God knows where else and with more of these people, facing God knows what. It’s obvious the people who are taking us there are under orders that involve keeping us in one piece. The people there may have other ideas. This being so, we have no option but to provoke a chance that doesn’t seem likely to present itself.
‘Lucas is plainly part of the Brotherhood that sticks to the Old Faith. His men are Christians. It may not get us anywhere. But working on that flaw within the Brotherhood structure is all we can do.’
I could see Martin was crying as we were tied back on our camels, and it wasn’t his piles that had brought this on. And except he was now screaming at his men rather more than he had, Lucas was still taking no risk with us.
The wind came up as the very late afternoon shaded into evening. For some time, I’d been aware of the deepening haze that moderated the sun. It deepened progressively, until the sun became a patch of dim red just above the horizon, and the little hills about us a blur. The chain of mountains that had lowered all afternoon in the far distance were now gone from sight. All around us, as if the land itself were crying out, there was a low moan of wind brushing on rocks.
As the first gusts began to stir up the dust into swirling clouds, I heard Lucas giving orders, a note in his voice of anger, though also of concern. Someone grunted back at him. I heard the sound of spitting. Further back, two men were beginning an argument. Someone reached from behind me to wind a sheet of cloth over my lower face. Then he prodded more life into my camel, and I had to lean hurriedly forward to avoid falling off.
Except it was dry and there was no thunder and lightning, it was just like a storm at sea. The winds howled around us with a terrible noise. Great clouds of dust were now whipped up to blot out the late remainder of the sun. The camel continued stolidly forward, but its head was down and it made little of its earlier speed. Ahead of me, men were shouting. It was the angry shouting of an argument that neither side wanted to concede.
Another while of this, and then we stopped. I felt arms reach up to pull me from the camel. I hit the impacted surface of the road with a heavy bump. I opened my eyes just a little. They were stinging from dust that had mixed like some caustic cement with the tears.
‘Get down there,’ Lucas shouted above the howling. He motioned at the outline of some rocks that were the nearest approach we’d find to shelter. ‘Put your cloak over you and keep your face down. Try anything funny, and I’ll kill your secretary.’
I did as I was told. The storm was now at its height. Keeping that cloak even over my mouth was as much as I could do. It was as much as I needed to do. Over my legs and trunk, I could feel the cold softness of the dust – or, after all, I should perhaps call it sand. Dust isn’t the right word for something that moves and settles like this stuff was doing. At first, it was a welcome softness. Then I began to worry about being buried alive. There was a whole army of Cambyses, I recalled, that had vanished in these deserts during a storm. After a thousand years, no one had come across the bones.
It was now every man for himself. We all cowered as best we could in the growing darkness. No one was paying attention to me. Time for what I guessed would be my only chance. I wriggled and stretched until my bound wrists were in my left armpit. It was there that I’d secreted the razor shortly after dinner on the boat. It had been the best I could do in the circumstances. While Martin was left to keep up his desperate pretence of normality, I’d slipped off to the stern, ostensibly for a shit. While alone, I’d stuck the razor there with a dressing from our medicine chest. Of course, my knife and sword had been taken as soon as the trap revealed itself. But I’d given such appearance of not noticing the preparations around me, that no one had thought to make a closer search. Now, it had been chafing and cutting me all day. Using it on the leather thongs wasn’t easy. Once or twice, my heart beat fast at the thought that I’d severed a vein. But once I’d got the first effective slice at the leather, the rest was easier. Still lying in the shelter of those rocks, I rubbed at the sore flesh and clenched and unclenched my fists.
Looking for Martin, I had to cut one throat. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. We’d been treated well enough so far, and I didn’t want that to change if I found myself back in captivity. Luckily, Martin’s was only the second mound of sand I’d disturbed. Now I had a knife, he was free in no time. It would barely have mattered in those winds had he shrieked like a eunuch singing in the theatre. As it was, he was remarkably calm.
‘I’ve been waiting all day for this,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I knew God would help you think of something.’ He’d altered his tune! Such, though, was Martin. But what next? If the storm was losing its main strength, the sands were still blasting everything uncovered like a rain of quicklime. If we waited for them to fall still, we might as well tie ourselves back up and hope the dead man wouldn’t be held against us.
‘This way,’ I shouted, pulling him towards where I’d seen the camels tethered. Could I get one of the things to move in this storm? How fast could it go with the two of us on its back? How much distance could we cover before we were missed? The storm over, we’d have the full moon directly overhead. We’d show up in that desert like lice on white skin.
All questions worth asking, but to be answered as and when.
‘If the sun is up there,’ I said, ‘this must be the way back to the Nile.’ I pointed uncertainly at the horizon. It looked like every other view from the top of the dune we’d managed to climb. We were in the middle of some vast, burning waste. Go where we pleased, its borders seemed to move with us, keeping us ever in its middle. If only that fucking camel hadn’t taken off as soon as we’d got down to nurse our sore bottoms.
‘Well, at least we had the water with us,’ I said, trying to sound more positive than I felt. I shook the heavy skin. There was still about a half-gallon. I’d stopped sweating some while ago. But we’d agreed it might be for the best to be economical with its use.
‘I did read somewhere,’ Martin croaked, ‘that the natives in the desert cover themselves in sand during the day and travel by night.’
I ignored him and squinted to see more of the horizon. We were now in desert roughly as I’d imagined it. There were still rocks to fall over if you didn’t keep looking. But the rippling sands spread out around us now, almost as white in the sun as a snowfield. Mostly, they lay flat. Here and there, though, the wind had piled them up into dunes fifty or sixty or perhaps even a hundred feet high. There was no wind now. From a perfectly clear sky that
