‘That’s one way of looking at it. But they might just have reckoned that if Taita raised me up in society, they’d benefit. Or maybe they just wanted one less mouth to feed. One less little person getting in their way. Does it really matter what the reason was? They’re gone from my life. They may both be dead by now, for all I know. There’s nothing I can do to change the past, so why even think about it?’

  ‘Because I can see it in your eyes – the sadness, the loss. Here you are, this strong, handsome man, with your square jaw and your big muscles, but there is a little boy inside you, who is lost and all alone.’

  Piay had been leaning across the table, with Myssa’s hand in his. Now he let go and turned his head away, as if her words had hit him like a slap in the face.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ Missa said, trying to appease him. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you—’

  ‘Just to make me feel weak.’

  ‘No, that’s not it at all.’ As Bast hopped up onto the tabletop, Myssa leaned across and took Piay’s hand again. ‘I’m saying that I desire you because you are the kind of man that any woman would want. You are a warrior, a leader . . .’

  Bast curled her tail neatly around her legs, watching the humans perform their little drama.

  Myssa paused to look at Piay’s face. He still looked far from happy, but she knew that there was one more form of praise that no man could resist.

  ‘And when we make love,’ she said, ‘I can feel your strength around me and in me and it makes me feel helpless, but also protected. So, you are a man, have no doubt of that. But when I see the sadness and loss in you, I know that you have a tender soul, and that I can protect you in the way a woman can, by sheltering and nurturing that part of you. You’ve saved me . . . but I can save you, too.’

  Something beyond the tavern caught Bast’s eye. She got up, stretched and walked to the edge of the table and dropped back down onto Myssa’s lap.

  ‘And there is one more reason why I love you,’ Myssa said. ‘You . . . Ow!’

  Her words were rudely interrupted as Bast suddenly hissed and stabbed her claws into her owner’s dress and the skin beneath its fine cotton fabric. With her footing secure, the little grey cat leaped to the ground and raced away down the street.

  Myssa frowned. ‘Something’s bothered her.’

  ‘Let her go,’ Piay said. ‘She can look after herself,’ he added, contemplating a second round of beer and stew.

  ‘No . . . this is serious.’ Myssa looked at Piay and said, ‘Trust me, she wants us to follow her.’

  P

  iay reluctantly got to his feet, then had to break into a run to catch up with Myssa and Bast. The cat trotted ahead of her pursuers, and then darted along a narrow alley between two rows of warehouses.

  The alley was deserted, the darkness between the buildings broken only by the amber glow of a couple of oil lamps above the doors of one of the warehouses at the far end of the passage.

  Bast suddenly stopped in her tracks, arching her back, and spat as if some predator waited just ahead in the shadows. Myssa crouched down beside her pet.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, my darling?’ she cooed, reaching out to stroke Bast’s back.

  The cat flinched, rejecting Myssa’s touch, still looking down the alley with her teeth bared.

  Piay peered into the darkness, wishing he had Bast’s feline night-sight. Slowly, his eyes became adjusted to the half-light and he was able to make out a grey shape sprawled on the dusty ground like a dropped sack, a few paces up ahead.

  ‘Oh no . . .’ he whispered.

  Fearing the worst, Piay drew his sword, his senses alert for whatever dangers might be lurking up ahead.

  As he drew closer, he could make out the body of a man, dressed in a white robe. Blood had pooled around the corpse from a slash across the man’s throat. His face was contorted in a rictus of fear and pain.

  ‘Stay back,’ Piay hissed to Myssa. ‘The killer could still be here.’

  He wondered who might have committed such a brutal crime on this night of jubilation. Thebes had always been a peaceful city, but in the confusion of the celebrations a thief might have seen an opportunity to rob wealthy folk wandering where they should not. And this victim was no common labourer, Piay could see. Expensive gold thread, embroidered in the shape of the sun god Ra’s orb, glinted on the chest of his bloodstained white robe.

  ‘Look,’ Myssa breathed, pointing ahead.

  Piay glanced in the direction she was indicating and saw what appeared to be four or five figures flitting along the alley, mere smudges amid the gloom. As they neared one of the burning lamps, their steps did not falter, nor could Piay spot a hand reaching up towards the light, and yet it winked out, and the one beyond it, too.

  Piay felt a prickle of unease, unsure what he was seeing or how the lights had been extinguished, but, whoever they were, it was too late to pursue them.

  Piay crouched beside the body to get a better look.

  ‘I know this man,’ he said as he studied the wrinkled features. ‘I saw him last night, before the battle, just as the old Pharaoh was dying. There were courtiers gathered to bear witness to his passing. He was one of them . . .’ Piay paused, frowning as he tried to picture what he had seen. ‘I think he must be a lord of some kind, because I’m sure I saw him at court, years ago, too . . .’

  His voice tailed off and he shrugged. As a young man at court, he had paid little attention to the old men who fussed around the Pharaoh. His attention was entirely focused on the female servants, handmaidens and noblemen’s daughters that filled the royal halls.

  ‘Poor man,’ Myssa said. ‘He must have been making his way to the palace and took this path to avoid the crowds.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Piay said again, his attention drawn back to the darkness at the end of the alley, where in his mind’s eye he could still see the mysterious figures flitting through the half-light. His mind raced with questions, but no answers came.

  Finally, Piay emptied his thoughts of fruitless speculation and got back to practicalities.

  ‘We should alert someone to deal with the remains,’ he said.

  B

  ast had disappeared. She obviously had her own plans for the rest of the night. Piay and Myssa, meanwhile, made their way to the gates of the royal palace. They described what they had found to a group of palace guards and urged them to pass on this news.

  Their task completed, Piay turned to Myssa and said, ‘I suppose we might as well get back to the festivities.’ But there was more unease than enthusiasm in his voice.

  As they pushed through the throng outside the palace, Piay could not turn his thoughts away from the body in the alley and the anonymous figures flitting through the darkness. Breaking through a mass of bodies, he found himself in the middle of a group that had gathered in a square outside one of the city’s taverns. They stood motionless amid all the chaos, gripped by the words of a tall, gaunt man, made frail by age, his face a map of his long life. A scribe, by the look of the scroll pressed against his chest, he was standing on an upturned wooden box, his face turned to the heavens, intoning in a thin, clear voice.

  ‘In the time before time the land of Egypt stood as one kingdom. All knew it as an age of peace and prosperity, when men learned to write and to sing and create great works of art. But then powerful men struggled for more power, as they always do, and that unity of purpose crumbled.’

  Caught in the scribe’s spell, Piay felt his thoughts fly back to his youth, and the classroom where Taita had first told him of the Red Pretender. In the years after Egypt had been split into two, the Pretender had ruled the Lower Kingdom, the territory to the north where the mighty Nile split into seven tributaries on its journey to the sea.

  Taita had served the Pharaoh Mamose of the Upper Kingdom, which lay upstream on the Nile’s southern banks. Mamose was the sworn enemy of the Red Pretender, and the two men had hurled their armies into a slew of battles, back and forth along the line between Upper and Lower Egypt, but for all the fighting and bloodshed, their forces were too evenly matched to bring about an endgame.

  And then the Hyksos came.

  Those warlike barbarians swept out of the east on chariots as fast as the wind, pulled by powerful horses, a beast that had never been known in Egypt. The Red Pretender and his army fell like barley before the sickle. And once the Hyksos ruled the Lower Kingdom, they turned their eyes to the south.

  Piay felt his heart harden. War with the Hyksos was all he had known. From the moment he became a man, he had choked on the black smoke of burning fields and tasted the iron tang of blood on the wind.

  Piay was jolted from his thoughts as the tone of the scribe’s voice became darker.

  ‘Yet this is a time of omens,’ the man was saying. ‘In the necropolis, monuments have collapsed and graves gape open. Strange things have been revealed in those pits. Some say the dead are returning, that the cities of the dead will take over the cities of the living—’

  ‘Get out of my way, you drunken oaf!’ A familiar voice cut through the waking dream the storyteller had cast, and angry faces turned, demanding a hush.

  Piay winked at Myssa. ‘I think we’re needed.’

  ‘If only to stop them turning on our friend,’ she whispered back.

  Hannu was thrusting his way through the densely packed crowd, his eyes narrowed under heavy brows as he searched the features of those who passed.

  ‘There you are,’ he exclaimed when he saw Piay and Myssa. ‘The guards said you’d come this way.’ He looked around to make sure no one was listening; his face was deadly serious. ‘There’s some bad things happening.’

  ‘I know,’ Piay said.

  He was about to tell Hannu of the body they had found, but the old guardsman was already moving away through the throng.

  ‘There’s talk of a messenger, rushing to the palace like Apep the snake was after him,’ Hannu called back to Piay and Myssa. ‘Mark my words, there’s trouble on the way.’

  As he and Myssa hurried to catch up with Hannu, Piay was thinking about the connection, if there was one, between all these portents of evil and unrest on what should have been a night of celebration.

  What remained of the shattered Hyksos army had been put to flight. Could they have regrouped in the north? Might they even now be preparing an attack to recapture what they had lost?

  That is not possible, Piay told himself. There are too few of them left to pose any serious threat.

  So what other threats might there be? Piay could think of none. Over the fifty years since the death of the Red Pretender and the conquest of the Lower Kingdom, Egypt had known no other enemy than the Hyksos.

  Myssa hurried alongside him as they ran through the streets. Away from the main thoroughfares, where the festivities were concentrated, it was quieter, and Piay could hear the slap of their footsteps echoing off the walls of the buildings.

  They were yards away from the road that ran into the city from the Falcon Gate in the city’s northern wall when Piay heard a commotion ahead, saw the revellers pulling each other out of the road.

  As they watched, a chariot thundered past, heading from the gate towards the centre of Thebes as if charging into battle. Its frame was edged in gold, in the style that the Hyksos favoured. For a second Piay wondered whether the enemy had after all somehow managed to mount a counter-attack. Perhaps he had been wrong? His body tensed, he pulled Myssa behind him so that he could protect her and drew his sword.

  Another chariot and then another swept past – the horses pounding dust high into the air – but now Piay could see that they must have been captured in the battle, for they were being driven by Egyptian soldiers. He relaxed a fraction. He and his companions were in no immediate danger. And yet, Piay could tell from the speed of their approach, the foam that flew from the horses’ mouths, the white muck sweat on their flanks, and the intense, almost manic expressions of the charioteers, that it must be bad business that drove them.

  As if to underline the point, the soldier standing next to the charioteer in the next chariot to pass, whom Piay took to be the captain of the whole group, was screaming at his driver to go even faster.

  Making their way into the road, Piay, Hannu and Myssa pressed themselves against the wall as two more chariots thundered by. And as they passed, Piay saw for the first time that the Egyptians were not alone. These two chariots were carrying additional passengers.

  One of them was dressed in a short robe, like a civilian, without any weaponry or armour. But Piay could tell at once by his clothes and the style of his hair and beard that he must be a Hyksos. Though not a very impressive one, he thought, for the man was scrawny. He was bent over, his hands gripping the frame of the chariot for dear life, and his face bore an expression of pure terror at the speed at which they were travelling.

  The other passenger was very different. He stood absolutely still, effortlessly keeping his balance, even as the chariot rattled and jumped on the rough road surface. His torso was a mass of tattoos and his entire face and head were covered by a leather hood.

  Piay frowned at the sight, wondering why the man’s captors had felt obliged to hide his face from public view. What did they not want the world to see?

  The chariots crashed on into the heart of the city.

  ‘Looks like they’re heading to the palace,’ Hannu rumbled.

  Piay nodded. ‘Then that is where we need to be.’

  W

  hen they reached the palace compound, Piay informed the guards at the main gate that he was the mighty Taita’s closest aide and came bearing news that the great man needed to hear.

  ‘He’s a busy man tonight, your master,’ the senior guard said, waving Piay, Myssa and Hannu through into the courtyard that lay beyond the gate.

  ‘Look over there,’ Myssa said, pointing to the far corner of the yard, where the chariots that had stormed past them stood gleaming under the lamplight. The horses stamped their feet and snorted, abandoned by the soldiers who had brought them in. Of those warriors there was no sign.

  ‘They were driving those horses like madmen. Why would they do that?’ Piay wondered aloud. ‘And on the night of our victory . . .’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ Hannu said. ‘But whatever they’ve got to say, it can’t wait.’

  Another guard ushered them between the towering pillars of the portico and through the great door. In the days before the Hyksos seized Lower Egypt, robbing the pharaohs of a great portion of their kingdom’s wealth, the palace would have been filled with light and perfumed air and the rustle of slaves going about their business. Soon all Egypt would lie under the new Pharaoh’s control and the royal court would return to its former glory, but for now only a few lamps glimmered around the vast entrance hall and shadows swallowed the ceiling. The air tasted of sweat.

  Piay, Hannu and Myssa strode through the chamber, their footsteps echoing in the emptiness as they made their way towards the great hall of audience where the throne stood. As they neared the entrance, Piay spotted two figures emerging from the interior, their faces drawn. The audience could not have gone well.

  One was King Hurotas of Sparta. He was broad-shouldered, with muscles hardened by a lifetime of combat, and the grey hair hanging from his balding scalp was still matted with the sweat of the day’s battle. He grinned when he saw Piay walking towards him.

  ‘Thank you, young man!’ he called in a cheery voice. ‘I’d have missed a fine day’s fighting if it hadn’t been for you!’

  It seemed an age since Piay had stood before Hurotas in his palace in Sparta, pleading with the king to send an army to ally with the Egyptians in their struggle against the Hyksos invaders.

  Piay bowed. ‘Egypt is forever grateful for your aid.’

  The other man was Taita.

  Any man might be exhausted by the task of leading an army in battle, but if Taita felt any fatigue, it had no more effect upon his appearance than his age. In sharp contrast to Hurotas, Taita looked as fresh and clean as if he had just stepped from a long, relaxing bath. He wore a pristine white robe that fell to his ankles, the front adorned with delicate stitching and jewels that marked out the wings of Horus spreading across his chest.

  His lips were still full, his eyes bright, his skin taut, his cheekbones and jaw clearly defined, and the air around him was sweet with the perfume of the lime and cardamom unguents that he worked into his skin each morning.

  It was as if the ravages that afflicted all other men never touched him. Taita always said that the gods had blessed him with an unfeasibly long life. Piay had often wondered if that gift had been bestowed because of the sacrifice his master had made when he became a eunuch: a recompense equal to the magnitude of his loss.

  Yet years of experience had taught Piay that Taita’s outward appearance was not always a guide to his inner mood. This had been a glorious day, but all was not well. Piay would have to tread carefully.

  ‘Come with me,’ Taita said. ‘We have much to discuss.’

  ‘You seem troubled,’ Piay replied, testing the waters.

  ‘There have been portents in the necropolis. Signs that weigh heavily on me.’

  ‘A scribe in the square was talking of the same . . . He said that the dead were rising.’

  ‘Perhaps, in a way, they are.’

  ‘I’ll be going now,’ Hurotas said. ‘You fellows get on with your business, I’ll find my own way out.’

  Taita bade the Spartan farewell and thanked him again for his role in the battle. Then he led Piay and the others through a maze of chambers to another large hall where dignitaries from foreign lands had once, in years long past, awaited their audience with the Pharaoh. The hall was as gloomy as everywhere else, with only a few pools of lamplight floating in the dark.

  The soldiers whom Piay had first seen racing past him on their chariots were not resting from their journey. Instead they stood with their swords drawn, their bare torsos still streaked with sweat and the dirt of the road, their faces filled with fear, as if they expected an attack to come at any moment.