River god - Smith Wilbur (чтение книг .TXT) 📗

  'I could make another for you now, if only you would allow us to live in a decent home like civilized people.'

  Tanus was similarly impressed with the water-wheel, though of course he would not show it. Instead, he grinned at me.

  'Very clever, but when will it burst like one of your famous chariot wheels?' he demanded, and Kratas and those other military oafs thought that was hugely funny. Thereafter, whenever a chariot wheel broke, they said that it had 'gone Tata', the pet name that the prince called me.

  Despite this levity, the fields of dhurra soon grew dense and green in the loamy soil on the high banks, and the ears of golden corn drooped heavily in the bright Nile sunlight. This was not the only harvest that we gathered in at the fourth cataract. Queen Lostris gave birth to another little royal princess. If anything, the infant was more exquisite than her elder sister.

  It was passing strange that Princess Bekatha was born with a cap of golden-red curls. Her divine and ghostly father, Pharaoh Mamose, had been of swarthy cast, and her mother's hair was dark as the wing of the black eagle. No one could think of any reason for this aberrant coloration, but all agreed how pretty it was.

  Princess Bekatha was two months old when the Nile began to rise once more, and we made our preparation for the transit of the fourth cataract. By now we were experienced in what had become an annual labour, and we had learned every trick and artifice to beat the rapacious river.

  WE HAD NOT YET BEGUN THE TRANSIT, when there was tremendous excitement in the encampment. I heard the shouting and the cheering from the far bank of the river where Prince Mem-non and I were inspecting the horses and making certain that all was ready for the ascent of the cataract.

  We hurried back to the boats and crossed to the east bank, to find the camp in an uproar. We pushed our way through the crowds who were all waving palm-fronds and singing the songs of welcome and honour. At the centre of all this we found a small caravan of battered wagons and skeletal horses, and a band of lean, travel-hardened veterans, burned black by the sun and tempered by the desert.

  'Seth damn you and that map of yours, Taita,' Lord Aqer shouted at me from the leading wagon. 'I don't know which of you lies worst. It was almost twice as far as you promised us.'

  'Did you truly reach the north side of the river loop?' I shouted back at him, hopping with excitement and trying to fight my way through the crowd.

  "There and back!' he laughed, mightily pleased with his accomplishment. 'We camped at the second cataract and dined on fresh fish from the Nile. The road back to Thebes is open.'

  My mistress ordered a feast to welcome back the travellers, and Lord Aqer was the man of the day. At the height of the celebration, Queen Lostris placed the Gold of Praise around his neck, and promoted him to the rank of Best of Ten Thousand. My gorge rose to see the fellow preen and strut. As if that was not enough, she gave him command of the fourth division of chariots, and issued him a warrant that would entitle him to one hundred feddan of prime land on the river-bank when we returned to Thebes.

  I thought all this a little excessive, especially the gift of so much land which must come out of my mistress's own estate. After all, Aqer had been on the brink of mutiny, and though his achievement had been laudable, it was I who had proposed and planned the expedition. In the circumstances, it seemed to me that another gold chain for the poor slave Taita might not have been out of place.

  Nevertheless, I had to applaud my mistress's cunning and statesmanship. She had transformed Lord Aqer, who had been potentially one of her most dangerous enemies, into an ardent and loyal adherent who would prove his value to her many times in the years ahead. She had a way with all men, and was gaining in statecraft each day.

  The taming of Lord Aqer and the discovery of the route across the bight had secured our rear, and we could go on above the fourth cataract with high spirits and brave heart.

  WE HAD NOT TRAVELLED MORE THAN A month before we realized how our fortunes had changed and how the goddess had made good her promise.

  It was clearer each day that we had come through the worst. The desert was behind us at last, and the broad, smooth flow of the river turned into the south once more and carried us into a land such as none of us had seen before.

  It was here that for the first time many of our company witnessed the miracle of rain. Although of course I had seen it in the Lower Kingdom, they had never seen water fall from the sky. The rain beat down into our upturned and astonished faces, while the thunder rolled across the heavens and the lightning blinded us with its white fire.

  These copious and regular rains engendered a new and exciting landscape, the like of which we could only wonder at. On either bank of the Nile, as far as we could see from the deck of the leading galley, stretched a broad savannah grassland. This magnificent plain, rich with grazing for our horses, set no boundaries to the range of our chariots. We could drive out at will, with no dunes or rocky hills to block our progress.

  This was not the only blessing that the goddess had bestowed. There were trees. In the narrow valley that was bur home, there might once have been forests, no man could tell. But they had fallen centuries before to the appetite and axes of man. Wood was to us Egyptians a rare and treasured commodity. Each stick of it had to be carried in by ship or on the back of beasts of burden, from far and foreign lands.

  Now, wherever we looked, we saw great trees. They grew, not in the same dense forests that we had found on the islands in the cataracts, but in lofty groves with broad grassy spaces between the majestic trunks. There was timber enough upon these plains to rebuild all the fleets of all the nations on all the seas of the worlds. More than that, there was enough to rebuild the cities of all the civilized world, and to roof and furnish every room in them. After that there would still be enough left over to burn as fuel over the centuries to come. We who all our lives had cooked our food on bricks made from the dung of our animals, stared around us in wonder.

  This was not the only treasure that we found for our taking in this legendary land of Cush that we had reached at last.

  I saw them first in the distance and thought that they were monuments of grey granite. They stood upon the yellow grass plains and in the shade beneath the spreading branches of the acacia groves. Then, as we watched in perplexity, these great rocks began to move.

  'Elephants!' I had never seen one before, but they could be nothing else. The cry was taken up by those on the deck around me.

  'Elephants! Ivory!' These were riches that Pharaoh Ma-mose, with all his funerary treasure, could not have dreamed of. Wherever we looked, the vast herds stood.

  'There are thousands of them.' Tanus gazed around him, the passion of the huntsman beginning to dawn in his eyes. 'Just look at them, Taita. There is no end to their numbers.'

  The plains were thronged with living creatures, not only the herds of elephant. There were antelopes and gazelle, some of which we knew, and others that we had never seen or heard of before. We would come to know all of them well in the future, and find names for their abundant and diverse species.

  Oryx mingled with herds of purple waterbuck whose horns curved like the bow that I had built for Tanus. There were spotted giraffe with necks that reached to the top branches of the acacia trees. The horns that grew from the snouts of the rhinoceros were as tall as a man and as sharp as his spear. The buffalo wallowed in the mud at the river's edge. They were huge bovine beasts, black as Seth's beard, and every bit as ugly. We would soon learn the malevolence behind that melancholy stare with which they regarded our passing, and the menace of those drooping black horns.