Khu: A Tale of Ancient Egypt (15 page)

“
No. We must not leave. They will find us!”

“
Let us go Mother,” Khu urged.

“Your father will return soon. We must do as he said and stay here.”

“Now Mother,” Khu insisted, “before it’s too late.”

But his mother refused to go. She believed
they were safely hidden.

Now that Khu was fully awake and alert, the magnitude of the terrible danger they were in hit him with full force.

He knew his father would not return. He knew this. He knew something had happened to him; something terrible. He was gripped by a sudden chill at the moment of his father’s death, and had cringed from the force of it. But he did not say so to his mother. It would only make her panic. He knew death was sweeping over the village like a scorching sandstorm blown by the hot desert winds over the land, and all they could do was wait like mice burrowing in a shallow hole.

He wanted to flee. He wanted to run. He wanted to head
over to the river before the predators returned to sniff them out and pounce on them. But his mother was too afraid to go anywhere. She did not want to expose her children to the danger outside.

And so they waited.

More screams pierced the darkness, shattering the tranquility that had reigned only hours before. Khu’s mother clung tightly to her children and shut her eyes against the fear burning within her. She had heard rumors of other villages besieged by raiders. She had heard talk of how villains slayed entire settlements—men, women and children—before plundering whatever wealth could be found in their tombs, temples and granaries. But it never entered her mind that
this
village could be attacked as well. It was the kind of inconceivable atrocity that happened elsewhere, far from the safety of home.

Those were the
unthinkable horrors that happened to
other
people.

And as she bent down on the floor,
adjusting the sheet to shield her precious children from the danger looming nearby, a man entered the room. He was tall with a wolfish skull and elongated chin.

Khu’s mother stood up at once
with a startled gasp, stepping quickly in the opposite direction to draw the man’s attention away from the corner where her children hid. A surge of adrenaline filled her with the courage of a lioness protecting her young from a clan of ravenous hyenas. She faced her attacker squarely with nothing but her clenched fists at her side.

Under the sheet, Khu’s sister squirmed and
began to cry. He tried to clamp his hand over her mouth, but she got away from his protective embrace.

Khu’s mother shot a
sidelong glance at the little girl who crawled toward her on the floor. His mother tensed her entire body, her jaw clenched tightly, and her eyes wide with terror as she held her breath, willing the child to back away with all the might of her being; willing her to disappear from view, out of danger’s sight; willing her to remain safe and invisible; willing for the impossible, for a feat of godlike proportion that would never come.

But the girl did not go.

And with every inch of the child’s movement, Khu’s mother felt her heart beating harder and louder to nearly bursting point.

The man followed her gaze as he slowly lifted the dagger in his hand. He pushed Khu’s mother out of the way before killing the girl in one swift strike.

His mother
fell back against the wall, shrieking at the senseless and incomprehensible brutality of her child’s murder, and her eyes filled with a wild hysteria. It was a savage, bloodcurdling sound that wrenched Khu’s heart in two.

She lunged at the killer then. She
leaped toward him full of anguish, desperation and madness, but her agony was snuffed out with another strike of the man’s blade.

Khu did not move.

His mother’s dead body crumpled over the sheet that partially covered him, saving his life as it shielded him from view.

The
man stood there for a few moments searching the darkness with black sunken eyes, glittering with a feral glare. He did not see Khu watching him intently, absorbing every nuance of his lupine face—including the tic that made one side of the man’s jaw twitch. And as the slayer turned to leave, Khu shuddered from the depravity seeping from the man’s dead soul, like the blood pooling around him.

Khu went into shock after that.

He lost all track of time as a strange numbness crept over him. It might have been minutes or hours that he lay under the sheet drenched in the blood of his mother and sister. He was curled into a ball with his knees drawn up under his chin, and his arms wrapped tightly about them. He rocked back and forth in the darkness, bracing himself against the trembling that assailed his body. With every passing moment, his mind retreated further and further away from the terrible violence which threatened his life and sanity.

He remembered nothing after that.

Nothing of the massacre that changed his life in one cruel and merciless instant. Nothing of the way he crawled out from the sheet and stared, transfixed, at the lifeless bodies of his mother and sister, in whose blood he was soaked. Nothing of the way he crept soundlessly like a cat in the shadows through the village whose occupants now lay dead. Nothing of the way he climbed aboard a raft, and pushed away from the river’s muddy bank with an oar, to glide silently along the still waters of the Nile. He floated on the river, putting more and more distance between him and the ravaged village, before finally falling asleep from exhaustion.

Only the traitorous
moon watched from the black sky, along with a solitary jackal that paused from his feeding on a fish he had caught in the shallow water by the riverbank. The jackal froze with the fish in his mouth, blood dripping down his chin, to stare with glowing eyes at the boy who was drifting through the death-defiled night.

“Higher, aim HIGHER,” Qeb enunciated the word in his deep, accented voice while gently lifting Nakhti’s arm supporting the bow whose string was pulled taut. “Good, now watch your stances.” He was circling both Khu and Nakhti as they practiced their archery skills from the ship’s bow. “Balance, BALANCE. Straight, but not stiff,” their trainer alternately raised and lowered his voice, his long muscled arms crossed over his chest as he watched the boys closely.

They were aiming the bronze-tipped points of their goose-fledged arrows
toward a thicket in the marshes where wild geese were feeding by the egret and heron picking their way through the tall grasses on long spindly legs. A heron thrust its sharp dagger-like beak into the opaque water, plucking out a green frog wading nearby, and swallowed it whole in one gulp before disappearing behind the reeds.

No clouds marred the wide blue sky stretch
ing as far as the eye could see. They had gotten up early to hone their archery skills and to hunt for the wild birds foraging in the cool morning before the midday sun burned too hot. The mist which had settled over the Nile’s bank had thinned and pulled away like long tentacles drawn back into the dense wetlands bordering the river.

The boys
pulled the bowstrings tighter until they were touching their noses and mouths, their elbows poised slightly above their shoulders. They anchored their drawing hands against their cheeks, brows drawn in concentration, as they aimed at the wild geese pecking at small insects and fish by the reeds along the riverbank. All the muscles in their backs were as taut as the bowstrings upon which the arrows were nocked. Then they released the strings, loosing the arrows as their bodies absorbed the recoil of the effort.

The arrows shot silently through the air, hitting their targets as the startled geese
flailed wildly, trying in vain to escape certain death. The commotion alarmed the egret and heron, and flushed out some quail, snipe and other smaller birds hiding in the shrubbery. A bunch of feathers broke free of the wild flutter of wings, and rose softly through the air, as the birds flapped anxiously before settling back in the marshes that afforded them refuge.

The boys hooted, proud of their success
, and clapped each other on the back.

Qeb looked satisfied but did not smile.
It was enough to cheer the boys. He sent them off on a small reed boat to collect the birds which would be eaten that night, along with the fish caught that day.

Khu and Nakhti would often hunt with their bows and arrows to help feed the men on board. Mentuhotep sometimes participated in the hunt, which was a favorite pastime for him and other nobility, and something in which he indulged whenever he could at home.
The boys practiced their fighting skills daily aboard the ship. They were at least as good as any of the best men in Mentuhotep’s army.

But they had never fought in battle.

They had never killed a man. They had never sought cover from a barrage of arrows raining down a storm of fire and death from above. They had never seen the madness in a man’s eyes as he charged with the rage of a ferocious wild boar with daggers poised to gouge like tusks. They had never smelled the rank fear of a man loosening his bowels in the face of death, or vomiting bile as he choked on terror and his own blood.

These were the things that tore jagged wounds into the soul
. The deep and invisible lacerations which bled long after the fires were put out, and the cold ashes were scattered by the wind.

Nothing could
undo the red, angry scars disfiguring a man’s soul. Nothing could erase the suppressed images which bore painfully into the mind, and woke him shivering and panicked in a cold sweat during the night. Survival was more than the preservation of life. It was tenacity in the face of ruin, an unbroken resolve in the midst of defeat, a glimmer of hope in the maelstrom, and peace despite the wreckage.

No, the boys had not yet been tes
ted.

B
ut their time would come soon.

Ten days had passed since they left Thebes.
Their ship’s narrow prow and stern were painted in bright blue, green and gold, jutting proudly as they cut through the water. It was built long and lean, flaring gently at midship so it could float over shallower water. No keel projected from its flat bottom, whose acacia and tamarisk planks were fastened together and caulked with papyrus. Its wooden mast was tipped with a bronze finial to which the papyrus sail was tied when in use. Its oars were secured on deck when not slicing through the water like knives, from the ropes which served as a fulcrum to hold them in place.

They had sailed past small villages and settlements
flourishing along the lush Nile Valley. Date palms grew in a thick expanse, and their branches looked like giant green feathers swaying gently under the sun. There were sycamore and tamarisk trees, and acacias with their large curved canopies bowing down like the protective arms of a mother gathering her children. Carob trees hung with long green and dark purple pods in varying stages of ripeness. And beyond the marshes flanked by the slender papyrus reeds, the land was speckled with flocks of goats, sheep and cattle feeding on the velvety grasses carpeting the smooth and fertile valley. 

They had stopped in Swentet just north of the Nile’s first cataract, where some of the best granite quarries were found. Mentuhotep had taken Khu and Nakhti with him and
his entourage of officials when he checked on the mines supplying some of the finest stone in all of Egypt. It was these quarries that furnished the rock which was carved into monolithic shrines, statues, obelisks, columns and monuments, among other structures gracing the east and west banks of the life-giving Nile. The mines were also supplying some of the stone which would decorate Mentuhotep’s partially constructed mortuary temple
Akh Sut Nebhepetre
—Splendid are the places of Nebhepetre—that was cut into the rock of the cliffs, where Henhenet and his infant daughter had been laid to rest. His tomb was the first in a complex of mortuary temple-tombs and shrines which would eventually become known as Deir el-Bahari in the subsequent millennia.

Swentet was also an important garrison town and served as a military
training base for Mentuhotep’s soldiers. Many of the men had been recruited from the peasant and laboring classes, and trained from their youth. Others had been captured as children in battles and foreign raids, and trained since boyhood, while others still were mercenaries or foreign prisoners who had been forced into the army to serve the king. Boys from the nobility and upper classes were also enlisted and trained. Mentuhotep’s infantry was adept at fighting on both land and water, in the heat of hand-to-hand combat, or from the warships, galleys and skiffs equipped with brave fighters and a vast stock of weapons.

Tomorrow they would arrive in Lower Kush. It was there that
the bulk of his gold mines waited. But it was not just gold that Mentuhotep wanted from Kush. He wanted more men.

Like his nemesis Khety in the north, Mentuhotep also had loyal spies and emissaries stationed in various parts of the land along the most important settlements and cult centers
on the east and west banks of the Nile.