Still, there was no denying it was convenient. He turned his horse and rode back down along the track beside his units, with the standard-bearer, scribes, aides, and messengers behind him. The rutted track was deep in sand, like most of the coastal plain of Canaan ... where it wasn’t swamp mud or rocks. The infantry in their banded-linen corselets plodded along, their brown faces darker yet with dust and streaked with sweat under their striped headdresses of thick canvas. Round-topped rectangular shields were slung over their shoulders, bronze spear blades glinted in the bright sun. After them came a company of Nubians, Medjay mercenaries from far up the Nile. Djehuty frowned; the black men were slouching along in their usual style, in no order at all ... although anyone who’d seen one of their screaming charges could forgive them that.
Then came one of the New Regiments; they wore only kilts and pleated loin-guards, but there were leather bandoliers of papyrus cartridges at their right hips and muskets over their shoulders. Djehuty scowled slightly at the sight of them, despite the brave show they made with their feet moving in unison and the golden-fan standard carried before them on a long pole.
Their weapons are good, he acknowledged. “But will they stand in battle?” he asked himself. They were peasants, not iw’yt, not real soldiers, raised from childhood in the barracks.
After them came the cannon themselves, wrought with endless difficulty and expense. Djehuty’s thick-muscled chest swelled with pride under his iron-scale armor at the number Pharaoh entrusted to him—a full dozen of the
twelve—pounders,
as they were called in the barbaric tongue of their inventors. Each was a bronze tube of a length equal to a very tall man’s height, with little bronze cylinders cast on either side so that the guns could ride in their chariotlike mounts. Very much like a chariot, save that the pole rested on another two-wheeled cart, the limber, and that was hauled by six horses with the new collar harness that bore on their shoulders rather than their necks.
Better for the horses, he admitted grudgingly, passing on to the chariots. Those had changed in the last few years as well. Besides a compound bow and quiver on one side, there was a scabbard on the other for two double-barreled shotguns, and the crew was now three, like a Hittite war-cart—one being a loader for the warrior who captained the vehicle.
He reined in and took a swig from the goatskin water bottle at his saddle. It cut gratefully through the dust and thick phlegm in his mouth, and he spat to the side and drank again, since there were good springs nearby and no’ need to conserve every drop. Years of work, to make the Brigade of Seth the finest in Pharaoh’s service, and then to integrate the new weapons.
To be good
commanders,
his father had told him, we must
love our army and our soldiers. But to win victories, we must
be ready to kill the thing we love. When you attack,
strike
like a hammer and hold nothing back.
“Stationed in Damnationville with no supplies,” he said, a soldier’s saying as old as the wars against the Hyskos.
“But sir, there are plenty of supplies,” his son said.
Djehuty nodded. “There are now, boy,” he said. “But imagine being stuck here on garrison duty for ten years.”
The young man looked around. To their left was the sea, brighter somehow than that off the Delta. The road ran just inland of the coastal sand dunes; off to the right a line of hills made the horizon rise up in heights of blue and purple. Thickets of oak dotted the plain, and stretches of tall grass, still green with summer rain. Grain turned yellow in a few patches of cultivation, here and there a vineyard or olive grove, but the land was thinly peopled—had been since the long wars Pharaoh had waged early in his reign, nearly forty Nile floods ago.
And those did not go well, he remembered uneasily—he’d been a stripling then, but nobody who’d been at Kadesh was going to believe in the great Egyptian victory that the temple walls proclaimed.
A village of dun-colored huts with flat roofs stood in the middle distance, dim through the greater dust plume of the Egyptian host passing north. The dwellers and their stock were long gone; sensible peasants ran when armies passed by.
By the standards of the vile Asiatics, the hairy dwellers in Amurru, this was flat and fertile land. To an Egyptian, it was hard to tell the difference between this and the sterile red desert that lay east of the Nile.
“War and glory are only found in foreign lands,” the younger man said stoutly.
“Well spoken, son,” the commander said. He looked left; the Ark of Ra was sinking toward the waters. “Time to camp soon. And Pharaoh will summon the commanders to conference in the morning.”
“My Kat’ryn ...” Kashtiliash of Babylon said.
“Yeah, Kash?” she said, looking up from the washstand. Beads of water ran down the smooth-muscled shoulders, over breasts like lathe-turned wine cups. The pink nipples stiffened to the touch of the chill water, in the predawn cold.
He seated sword and revolver more firmly on his hips and took a deep breath. Holding his spear firm for the charge of a lion or boar was easier than this. Kathryn took up a towel and began to dry herself; uniform and helmet and weapons waited on a stand in the corner of the rammed-earth commanders’ quarters.
“Kat’ryn, I have been months gone from the land of Kar-Duniash.”
She nodded, suddenly slightly wary. “Yes ... has anyone made trouble back home?”
“No,” he snorted. “Nor will any, so long as they know I would come down the Euphrates with the New Troops and the cannon should a usurper arise; also my half brothers are here with us—and you know that is not chance. But ... the Egyptians are moving, and they threaten our line of communications.”
“You’re worried about rebellion?” she said.
“I have no son of my Great Wife as yet,” he said quietly. “My others are children. If I were cut off here ...”
“You’re going to pull the army out, Kash?” she asked steadily. Lamplight glinted in the alien blue eyes.
“No,” he shook his head. “My word is good. But if our line to Babylon is threatened, I must send part of these troops to secure it. I
must
;
the safety of my House and the realm require it.”
She threw down the towel and came to him. “I understand,” she said. A sudden lynx grin. “So, let’s finish Walker first, and then it’ll be Pharaoh’s turn, eh?”
Ramses stood as erect as a granite monolith, wearing the military kilt and the drum-shaped red crown of war with the golden cobra rearing at his brows, waiting as still as the statue of a God. The officers knelt and bowed their heads to the carpet before him in the shade of the great striped canvas pavillion. There was a silence broken only by the clank of armor scales and creak of leather. Then the eunuch herald’s voice rang like silver in the cool air of dawn:
“He is The Horus, Strong Bull, Beloved of Ma’at; He of the
Two Goddesses, Protector of Khem who Subdues the Foreign Lands; the Golden Horus, Rich in Years, Great in Victories; He is King of Upper and Lower
Egypt
, Strong in Right; He is User-Ma’ at-Ra, Son of
Ra;
Ramses, Beloved of
Amun
.”
The officers bowed again to the living God, and Pharaoh made a quick gesture with one hand. The officers bowed once more and rose.
Djehuty came to his feet with the rest. Servants pulled a cover off a long table. It was covered by a shallow-sided box, and within the box was a model made of sand mixed with Nubian gum, smelling like a temple on a festival day. Its maker stood waiting.
The
outland
dog, Djehuty thought. Mek-Andrus the foreigner, the one who’d risen so high in Pharaoh’s service. He wore Egyptian headdress and military kilt but foreign armor—a long tunic of linked iron rings. Foreign dog. Disturber of custom.
“The servants of Pharaoh will listen to this man, now Chief of Chariots,” Ramses said. “So let it be written. So let it be done.”
Djehuty bowed his head again. If Pharaoh commands that I obey a baboon with a purple arse,
I
will obey, he thought. Mek-Andrus was obviously part Nubian, too, with skin the color of a barley loaf and a flat nose. The will of Pharaoh is as the decrees of fate.
The foreigner moved to the sand table and picked up a wooden pointer. “This is the ground on which we must fight,” he said. His Egyptian was fluent, but it had a sharp nasal accent like nothing any of the Khemites had ever heard before. “As seen from far above.”
All the officers had had the concept explained to them. Some were still looking blank-eyed: Djehuty nodded and looked down with keen interest. There was the straight north-south reach of the coast of Canaan, with the coastal plan narrowing to nothing where the inland hills ran almost to water’s edge; a bay north of that, where a river into the sea. The river marked a long trough, between the hills and the mountains of Galilee to the north, and it was the easiest way from the sea inland to the big lake and the Jordan valley.
“The Hittites, the men of Kar-Duniash, the
mariyannu
of the Asiatic cities, the Armanaean tribes, and their allies are aproaching from the northeast, thirty-five thousand strong not counting their auxiliaries and camp followers, according to the latest reports.”
The pointer traced a line down through Damascus, over the heights, along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, then northwest from Bet Shean.
“Of those, at least five thousand are infantry equipped with fire weapons, with thirty cannon, and four thousand chariots.”
None of the Egyptian commanders stirred; there was a low mutter of sound as the Sherdana mercenary leader translated for his monoglot subordinates, their odd-looking helmets with the circle of feathers all around bending together.
“Favored of the Son of Ra,” Djehuty said. “If we are here”—he pointed to a place half a day’s march before the place where the coastal plain pinched out—“can they reach the sea and hold the passes over Carmel against us?”
Mek-Andrus nodded; he no longer smiled with such boorish frequency as he had when he first came to Egypt. “That is the question. They were here”—he tapped the place where the Jordan emerged from Galilee—“yesterday at sunset.
Another rustling. That left the enemy further from the plain of Jezreel than the Egyptians, but the path the northerners must cross was over flat land with supplies to hand; the Egyptian force must cross mountains.
“Thutmose did it,” Mek-Andrus said. “If we take this pass”—his finger tapped—“as the Great One’s predecessor did, we can be here and deployed to meet them before they expect us.”
Thutmose ... Djehuty thought. Then: Ah. One of the great Pharaohs of the previous dynasty, the one that had petered out when the Accursed of Amun, the Enemy, tried to throw down the worship of the Gods in favor of Atun.
His eyes narrowed as he watched Mek-Andrus. How did the outland dog know so much of Khem? Djehuty knew the barbarian didn’t read the Egyptian script, so he couldn’t have simply read the story off a temple wall the way a literate, civilized man might. The fire-weapons themselves weren’t sorcery, just a recipe, like cooking—plain saltpeter and sulfur and charcoal, whatever the peasants might think. But there was something not quite canny about Mek-Andrus himself.
Yet the Gods have sent him to us. Without Mek-Andrus, the Hittites and Achaeans and other demon-begotten foreigners who knew not the Black Land or the Red would have had the new weapons all to their own. That would have been as bad as the time long ago when the Hyksos came with their chariots, before any Egyptian had seen a horse, and it had taken a long night of subjection and war to expel
them.
“Who should take the vanguard?” Pharaoh asked.
Mek-Andrus bowed. “Let Pharaoh choose the commander who has both wisdom and bravery ... and many cannon, so that they can hold off the enemy host until the whole army of Pharaoh is deployed.”
Remote as jackal-headed Anubis deciding the fate of a soul in the afterworld, Pharaoh’s eyes scanned his generals.
Djehuty fell on his face as the flail pointed to him. “Djehuty of the Brigade of Seth. The vanguard shall be yours. Prepare to move as soon as you may. You shall cross the pass and hold the ground for the rest of our armies. So let it be written! So let it be done!”
It was a great honor—and possibly the death sentence for the Brigade of Seth.
The courier threw back his head and drank, water running down his chin into the stubble and soaking into the filthy gray wool of his uniform tunic. The smithy was scorching, its thick adobe walls soaking up the heat of the two charcoal hearths, steam hissing as the hot shoe was plunged into the water. The man whose horse was being shod kept an eye on it even as he stuck the cup into the well bucket again; cooler out here ... and even now, a certain magic clung to ironworking.
It had been a long ride overland from his landfall in Athens, even with good roads. The almond trees in the field across from the smithy and relay station were in bloom, their scent a breath of freshness amid the dust and dung of the roadside smithy. Soon he would be in Walkeropolis, where he could rest.
The saddlebags had the Wolf Lord’s blazon on them. The death-fate laid on him if they were lost was gruesome.
The smith bent and lifted the right rear hoof between his knees, nails ready in his mouth. A slave girl came by just then, looking over her shoulder at the uniformed courier and letting her thin tunic draw tight against her buttocks. He smiled and worked the pump for her to fill her bucket.
Nevertheless, he was stern in his duty, shaking his head ruefully when she looked back at him from around the comer and rolled her eyes toward the stables. She made a face at him and walked off; he sighed and took the bridle of his horse as the smith’s boy led it out. He swung back into the saddle and heeled his mount to the graveled verge of the road.