Men of Bronze (29 page)

Psammetichus stood near, his attention wavering as Nebmaatra briefed him on current events.

“The regiments of Osiris, Khonsu, Bast, Sekhmet and Ptah have been called up and ordered to Pelusium to reinforce Amon, Anubis, Neith, and Horus. Also, a vanguard has been dispatched to Palestine to harry the Persians. The Mede, Gobartes, yet awaits an audience.”

“Let him wait. What of the funerary arrangements?”

“Pharaoh’s chapel in the precinct of Neith is complete,” Nebmaatra whispered. “Artisans and priests are working in shifts on the sarcophagus.”

Psammetichus held up his hand, signaling an end to the briefing. Nebmaatra bowed and padded from the room, gesturing for the guards to close the huge cedar doors.

Soft golden lamplight danced, giving artificial life to the ducks, fish, and marsh grasses painted on the plastered walls. Ahmose lay on a low bed strewn with cushions, sweat gleaming on his livid skin, his veins standing out like blue cords on his temples as his lungs sought breath. The old Pharaoh could scarcely rise, but he had enough strength left in his withered body to clamp Ladice’s hand in a vise-like grip.

“W-Wife!” he wheezed.

“Zeus take them!” Ladice exclaimed. “Those vultures and their damned music! They would entomb him while there is life yet in his veins!”

“We cannot ignore the inevitable,” Psammetichus said quietly. “Ritual must be adhered to, and the music is our way of telling Lord Osiris that a son of Ra stands at the edge of his realm.”

Sobs wracked Ladice’s shoulders. “Then there is no h-hope, is there?” Her fingers smoothed the creases on Pharaoh’s damp brow.

“There is always hope,” Psammetichus said. “Though not always for this life.”

Ahmose writhed, fighting against Ladice’s soothing touch. His eyes were glazing with the nearness of death. “Is-see them! Swords! Glittering and cold, t-thirsting for the flesh of the Nile! Wait!” he cried, his body knotted with spasms. “Stand firm! Hold the line against them! Psammetichus!”

“I’m here, father,” the Prince said, grasping the old man’s other hand.

“C-Cambyses is coming,” Ahmose gasped. Psammetichus leaned close, striving to hear his father’s faint words. “D-Deny him even an inch of Egyptian s-soil! Promise me! Promise me you w-will not fail!”

“I promise you, father,” Psammetichus said, his face solemn. Across from him Ladice bowed her head. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

Ahmose stiffened. His eyes rolled back into his skull. Psammetichus and Ladice, each holding one of his hands, felt his strength return for a brief instant before it ebbed away. Pharaoh’s dying breath rattled in his chest, and then he was still. Somewhere a jackal howled, the summoner of Anubis …

“There,” said the captain of the
Atum
, a heavy, sun-blackened Egyptian. Barca followed the captain’s gesture. The galley heeled drunkenly on the swells of the Mediterranean, rising and falling with each white-crested wave. Ahead, couched beneath mountainous sand dunes, the harbor city of Gaza smoldered in the late afternoon heat.

“We’ll put in ‘ere the sun sets.” The captain turned and bellowed orders. Sailors scampered over the tarred lines as they furled the sails and took up positions on the padded benches. A thick-bellied Nubian drummed a swift cadence; the rowers fell easily into rhythm. Their voices rose above the clack of oar locks:

Barca leaned against the rail, watching the growing coastline. He had visited Gaza often enough in his youth. It had been a regular port of call for his father’s ships. A three-mile stretch of desert divided the city into two districts: Maiumas, the harbor in the sand dunes, and Gaza proper, situated on an inland plateau. The ancient coast road, the Way of Horus, ran between the two and gave Gaza a strategic importance that belied its size.

A strategic importance that had mushroomed in the past few months.

Barca stroked the ridge of scar tissue creasing his side, frowning. The Phoenician could not remember those last hours at Memphis. He had no recollection of leading the final assault against the shattered dregs of the Greek garrison, no recollection of Phanes’ narrow escape. Only a scarlet haze of half-seen shapes and the roaring of dream voices. Barca recalled waking once, he recalled bright sunlight and starched linen and incense-laden smoke. Pottery clattered against stone. He struggled, and the pressure of a hand on his chest stilled him. A voice, soothing and feminine, whispered, “It’s not your time yet, Hasdrabal. Do you hear me? Go back to sleep. It’s not your time.”

He doubted he could ever forget that voice. Later, he learned Jauharah had presented herself at the palace as his slave, and that the lie went unquestioned. She refused to leave his side the whole time he hovered at Death’s threshold, tending night and day to his fever, his infection; she sent lesser slaves to scour the archives of the House of Life for every scrap of knowledge on wounds and their treatment, seeking some sort of weapon against the demons ravaging his soul.

Under her care, his strength returned gradually, and with it came impatience.

Phanes had slipped Egypt’s grasp at Memphis and, later, Pharaoh’s spies lost track of him after he crossed the Orontes, in the foothills of the Amanus Mountains of northern Syria. With vengeance for his men unslaked, Barca’s rage worsened.

He recalled an afternoon spent in the shade of the palace gardens, a sweet, warm breeze ruffling the leaves of a grape arbor. None too carefully Barca had stretched his bandaged torso through a series of sword drills meant to restore flexion to his damaged muscles, exercises that left him trembling and bathed in sweat. He began again, then cursed as his sword slipped from his weakening grasp.

“You push yourself too hard,” said a voice from beneath the arbor. Ahmose hobbled out into the dappled sunlight. Pharaoh looked pale, drawn, the dark circles under his eyes giving him a singularly ghoulish cast. “That’s what happened in Memphis, isn’t it? You pushed yourself to the brink of death?”

“Majesty,” Barca said, bowing stiffly. Pharaoh dispelled such pleasantries with a wave of his hand and indicated a bench near the lotus pool. “A soldier’s duty is to push himself unto death.”

“Sit with me, my friend.” For the first time Barca saw the tales of Pharaoh’s ill health were more than mere palace gossip. “The physicians tell me you will recover. Myself, I am not so lucky.”

Barca struggled into a more comfortable position. His fingers rubbed the blood-spotted bandages and the itching wound beneath. “They are wrong, Majesty. You are the Son of Ra, and you will live forever.”

Ahmose sighed. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh …” he trailed off. Pharaoh suffered from a wasting sickness, aggravated by the daily exertion of retaining his throne and accelerated by the lingering effects of the clash at Memphis. “Did you know,” he began, “Sethnakhte entered my service the same season as you, virtually the same month? He spoke against you often, counseling that I should have you put down as if you were a feral dog. I should have recognized the weakness in his character from his penchant for spreading lies, but instead I fostered his career over yours because the gods, in their inscrutable wisdom, deigned to place him in the womb of a fine Egyptian noblewoman. Yet, never did he risk his life for me with such frequency and savagery as you, a child of foreign merchants.” Pharaoh smiled. “With Sethnakhte banished, it becomes my inclination to foster your career … until I remember that I am not the reason you risk your life, am I, Hasdrabal?”

The Phoenician bristled. “My life has always been yours to command! I …”

Ahmose held up his hand. “Stay your indignation, my friend. These eyes are old and rheumy, but they yet possess the faculty of sight. You serve me because I am a means to an end. Your end. I cannot fathom what it must be like for you, existing with a rage so expansive and all-consuming that it drives you to seek entrance to the Halls of Judgement. It has blinded you to the simplest of truths: Death comes for us all. It requires nothing of you, save patience.” Pharaoh stood, his hand on Barca’s shoulder. “I am dying, Hasdrabal, and I have a last command for you: I order you to live. Banish your rage and be patient. Let Anubis seek you on his own terms.”

Barca’s mind returned to the present. He straightened, frowning.
I order you to live
. Did Pharaoh understand what this entailed? To live without rage, he would have to descend into the darkest part of himself to do battle with that grim phantom he called the Beast; he would have to defeat the very thing that gave him strength. Could he survive without it? What’s more, would he want to?

The
Atum
was a troop transport, wide of belly and long of keel, packed to the railings with soldiers of the elite regiment of Amon. They, along with the garrison at Gaza, would, under Barca’s command, harry the Persian advance. Barca suspected, even before the rumors started, that Phanes had drifted down the Euphrates to Babylon and attached himself to the court of Cambyses of Persia. A solid move on the Greek’s part. Cambyses longed to accomplish what his father, Cyrus, had been unable to do: extend his dominion over the lands of Egypt. Like his sire, Cambyses would soon learn a hard lesson: the Negev Desert was too formidable a barrier for an army to cross. Barca had little doubt that a soldier of Phanes’ caliber could find a way to ferry an army across the inhospitable wastes of Negev to within striking distance of the eastern Nile. Could a soldier of
his
caliber stop him?

Barca put his back to the rail and folded his arms across his chest, watching. In the waist of the
Atum
, the Nubian boatswain kept a brisk cadence; the oarsmen bellowed their songs in time with his staccato drumbeats. Further aft, the captain harangued a sailor at the tiller, his words drowned out by the rising song, the clack of oar locks, and the hiss of water sliding past the hull.

With Ahmose ill and Psammetichus an untried ruler, Barca had no illusions about the coming months. It would be a hard fight; Egypt’s fate rested in the hands of the self-styled kings of Arabia, Bedouin bandits who controlled the scant water resources of the Negev desert. If they could be convinced to side with Egypt, then Cambyses — and Phanes — could be dealt with before ever reaching the eastern frontier. If not, if Arabia fell under Persia’s spell … well, if that happened, he prayed Psammetichus had the stomach for a prolonged war.

Barca spotted Callisthenes moving toward him. The months since Memphis had wrought serious changes in the Greek. The fat merchant was gone, dead, slain in the fighting at the Northern Gate only to be reborn as the lean figure who cat-footed across the
Atum
‘s deck. Callisthenes still bore some resemblance to his former self: a shadow of a paunch; a fold of loose skin under his chin; the ever-present scarab amulet thonged about his neck. But everything else about the man had changed, including his temperament. Barca could tell as he approached that the Greek was in one of his now-frequent sour moods.

“You could have handled this without me, you know,” Callisthenes said by way of greeting. He leaned over the rail. Below, several sinister grey fins paced them.

“How many times must I defend my decision with you? You are politic, my friend,” Barca said. “I have neither the stomach nor the inclination to play games with the Arabians. I will have my hands full assaying the Persian approach. I need you to act as my liaison to the governor.”

“And the woman?”

For all his Egyptian sensibilities, Callisthenes yet retained a Greek’s contempt of women. To the Hellenes, women served a two-fold purpose: to bear sons and manage the affairs of the home. They had no legal rights beyond those enjoyed by slaves. Of course, there were exceptions. Spartan women were free to own property, to participate in the gymnasium; older Athenian women were accorded more leeway in their public dealings. On the whole, though, a Greek woman’s life was one of bitterness and pain.

“What about her?” Barca said. “Jauharah’s people are Arabian. She knows their tongue, and we’ll have need of our own interpreter. I’m evidence enough of her skills as a healer. She will be useful.”

Callisthenes spat. “There’s no use for a woman in the vanguard of war, Phoenician. You know that better than any man here. Why is she really with us? Are you taken with this woman, or are you seeking to atone for the past?”

The look in Barca’s eyes as he stared at Callisthenes turned the Greek’s blood to ice. Rage piled upon fury, like clouds in a thunderstorm, waiting to unleash elemental ruin at the slightest provocation. Callisthenes realized with a shudder that the only thing keeping him alive at that moment was the Phoenician’s iron will.

“I spoke out of turn. Forgive me,” Callisthenes said glumly. “I am so far out of my element that death would be a godsend right now. You just don’t understand, Barca. If I help you, men will die. If I do not, if I bury myself beneath invoices and bills of lading, those men will still die but their blood will not be on my hands.”