‘I must admit, you have kept your side of the bargain, priest,’ Piay said. ‘This is remarkable information. But tell me, do you Hyksos know where the secret is buried?’

  ‘Ha!’ Shamshi laughed. ‘If we did, we would now be in Thebes, and you would be our slaves.’

  ‘Then you know nothing of value.’ Hannu exhaled with disdain.

  Shamshi tightened his grin.

  ‘Go on,’ Piay said.

  ‘Some of your people now consider Imhotep a god. I can see how they would think that. His wisdom and his knowledge of all things have never been equalled. He watched and he learned and his mind made calculations. It is said that when he closed his eyes, those calculations opened up to him the great sweep of days yet to come. His prophecies caused some to call him a sorcerer. Perhaps . . .’ Shamshi shrugged. ‘But there is no doubt he predicted a dark time for Egypt—’

  ‘Caused by you bastards,’ Gatas hissed.

  ‘. . . and he was determined to prepare for that age, even though it would come around many lifetimes beyond his allotted span. So, let me tell you now, not what I know, but what I think. You are aware that Imhotep was known as the Great Architect?’

  ‘Of course,’ Piay said.

  Shamshi glanced at Piay, and as their eyes met it struck Piay that they might both be playing the same game: bluffing, dissembling, trying to find out exactly what the other knew, where they stood and what their intentions might be.

  Then that brief moment was over and Shamshi was saying, ‘We believe, as maybe you do, too, that Imhotep had a hand in all those monuments that brood across the wilderness at Giza, not far from Memphis. One he designed himself. For the others, he left . . . who can say? Plans, perhaps. Guidance. So consider now the nature of these monuments. See how they have survived for a thousand years, untouched by fires, floods, storms and wars. Imhotep knew that time could not touch them. What better place could there be for him to hide his clues?’

  As the last of the sun’s rays were swallowed by the dark, Hannu lit the lamp that stood next to the steersman’s platform. Faces glowed in the circle of light.

  ‘What if the clues open a path?’ Shamshi said as he stared at the flame. ‘A path that is also a ritual. Each step taken along it opens another door, and another threat, for death lurks on every side. Only the wisest will find a way to the ultimate reward. This was Imhotep’s plan, for only then could he be certain that the treasure he had left behind would be used in the manner he intended. The greedy and the weak and the unworthy would be doomed.’

  ‘Aye, and you and your barbarian brothers are trying to prove him wrong,’ Hannu rumbled.

  Shamshi smiled. ‘Perhaps we are not barbarians. We may have among us the man who will be fit to answer Imhotep’s call.’

  ‘No!’ Piay said. ‘Imhotep could not possibly have wanted someone who was not of his people – our people – to solve his riddle!’

  ‘Do you think you can be sure of what a man of such wisdom would want? A man born of a god who himself became a god . . . Who are we to claim to know his ultimate intentions? You, Egyptian, believe that you have the right to solve this riddle. But ask yourself this – are you sure that you are wise enough and worthy enough to solve Imhotep’s puzzle? Or is it only death that awaits you?’

  Silence fell on the group for a moment, so that the only sound was that of the waves lapping against the hull.

  Is the barbarian right? Piay wondered. Am I up to that challenge?

  He glanced around the faces and was warmed to see neither Hannu nor Myssa were looking at him with that doubt.

  ‘Ho!’ A watchman’s cry echoed across the deck, jolting everyone from their own thoughts.

  ‘Who’s making that infernal noise?’ Harrar snapped from the shadows beneath his shelter. He sounded as if he had been dozing.

  Piay jumped to his feet and leaped from bench to bench until he reached to where the soldier leaned against the rail, peering towards the bank.

  ‘Thought I saw movement. Out there.’

  The watchmen pointed, but the dark across the fields and the papyrus were impenetrable. Piay searched back and forth along the bank, but no movement caught his eye. He felt pleased that he had taken the decision to drop the ship’s stone anchor just beyond the shallows, so that there was an expanse of water between them and dry land. They would, he had hoped, hear anyone splashing in the river if they tried to reach them.

  ‘Be on your guard,’ he called to the other watchmen along the rail. ‘At the first sign—’

  An arrow flashed out of the night and punched into the throat of the watchman standing next to him. The man keeled back, choking, his hands clutching at the shaft. He staggered, bumped into the guardrail and toppled backwards.

  The Sons of Apis were on the attack.

  ‘B

  owmen!’ Piay bellowed so that his voice would carry to the other galley. ‘Keep your heads down!’ He turned towards Captain Gatas, ‘Get the priest and Myssa down below!’

  Barely had the words left his lips than arrows whirred through the air across the length of the galley. Most whisked across the deck and splashed into the river on the other side; one or two crunched into the wood of the guardrail.

  A high-pitched wail rose up and Piay wrenched round. At first, he thought Harrar had been wounded. The nobleman was lying on his belly, his hands over his head, screaming. An arrow had ripped through the canopy of his shelter; that was all.

  Damned coward! Piay thought.

  More shouts came – dripping apparitions were hauling themselves over the starboard rail, their skull-like faces ghastly in the torchlight. Each of them carried a curved knife as they heaved themselves up. On the rail, bronze hooks dug into the wood, hide ropes trailing behind them. Whether the Sons had swum around the ship or used vessels unseen in the dark, Piay couldn’t be sure.

  Piay heard the commander of the Blue Crocodile Guards firing orders to the guardsmen who’d been on duty. Roaring battle cries, they threw themselves at the attackers. A sword swung down like a butcher’s cleaver, hacking into the shoulder of one of the Sons. As the tattooed man fell away, his knife nicked the arm of the guardsman who had wounded him. It was barely more than a scratch, but a moment later the man was staggering backwards, foam bubbling from between his lips, clutching at his throat as if he couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Their weapons are dipped in poison!’ Piay yelled.

  The soldiers caught up his cry and passed it along. Hannu was already at the rail, fighting off one of the tattooed attackers, bobbing and weaving out of the reach of his poisoned blade.

  He fended off the initial attack, drew his opponent on, then saw the opportunity he had been waiting for. The attacker only left himself vulnerable for a blink of an eye, but that was enough for Hannu to lunge forward, stab his sword into the chest of his enemy and then rip his blade out in a sideways, cutting motion that dropped the Son of Apis to the deck, desperately clutching at his stomach, trying to hold in the guts that spilled out onto the blood-drenched wood.

  ‘Draw up the anchor!’ Piay yelled. ‘Get us out into the flow.’

  In the faster currents, their attackers would find it much harder to board and continue the slaughter.

  As Piay ran to Hannu’s side, so that each could watch the other’s back, he heard the rumble of the stone against the hull as the anchor was drawn up. It would take several moments before the ship was carried far enough away from the bank.

  He rammed his sword tip into the face of a Son of Apis who was pulling himself over the rail. The wounded attacker fell back and splashed into the river below. The blood would attract the river crocodiles. If the cultists were swimming, they would soon face a more frenzied foe.

  The battle raged up and down the deck. Men were falling on either side, but then the Blue Crocodile Guards, who had been scattered around the ship, formed themselves into a battle formation. Standing side by side, holding their shields together in a solid wall and jabbing their short stabbing spears in unison, they marched in a solid mass, from the stern of the vessel towards the bow, sweeping the Sons of Apis before them like a broom clearing litter from a floor.

  Finally, no new attackers pulled themselves up to replace the ones who had fallen. Piay hesitated at peering over the edge for fear it was a trap, but the only sound that reached his ears was the churning of the water where the river beasts fed.

  ‘How many are there?’ Hannu gasped.

  ‘Fewer now.’ Piay stepped back.

  ‘We showed those bandits what sharp bronze in the hands of brave Egyptians can do,’ Harrar declared, puffing out his chest as though he had personally led the fight to defend the ship.

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it, my lord,’ Piay replied. ‘Another was that this was just a skirmish to test our strength.’

  Now that the battle was done, the only sounds came from flowing water and creaking wood, but the Sons of Apis were still out there, somewhere in the darkness, waiting to make their next move. Piay turned his attention to the arrogant, lily-livered man by his side and finished his sentence.

  ‘. . . and the next time, they’ll know precisely how to conduct their attack.’

  N

  o captain liked to navigate the river at night, but they could not risk pulling into the bank until they had put some distance between themselves and the Sons of Apis.

  Only two of the Blue Crocodile Guards had been lost, and the boat’s crew, who were all now deeply grateful for being banished to the hold, were entirely untouched. Piay was sad to see any man die, but to have such light casualties was surely a blessing from Khonsu. With those knives dipped in lethal poison flashing back and forth, it had been a wonder they had not lost more.

  Harrar had decided to retire to the comfort of his shelter, rather than to offer his praise to the men who had defended him. Instead Piay moved among the soldiers, commending them on their courage. Many he already knew by name, and if he did not, he took a moment to find out about them and their families, so that they knew they were seen and appreciated. Piay knew that the greater the concern he showed for the men, the greater their willingness would be to risk their lives defending him.

  Sometimes it helps, coming from nothing, he thought. A man like Harrar, who has been waited on hand and foot all his life, has no idea that slaves, servants and soldiers are even really people at all.

  Piay fetched Myssa from below decks.

  ‘It’s safe now. They won’t come back tonight,’ he said.

  They walked together up to the prow and laid their bedding on the deck so that they might lie down together and gaze, side by side, at the sea of stars in the sky. Soon enough, they were both fast asleep, and it barely seemed like a moment later that Piay was awoken by a rough, calloused hand shaking his shoulder.

  Hannu’s face was looking down at him.

  ‘Time to get up,’ the old soldier said. He was holding two pottery cups, filled with wine and water. ‘For you two lovebirds.’

  Piay got to his feet and looked around, raising his hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun rising over the eastern bank of the Nile. The ship was sailing peacefully down the river, and the only obvious reminder of the night’s events was the sight of crewmen on their hands and knees, scrubbing blood from the deck.

  In the growing light, the land looked less foreboding. It was far easier to see any enemies moving among the irrigation ditches and the gently clacking shadoofs that dipped leather buckets down into the river, then popped up with those buckets brimming with fresh water. Piay looked at Myssa, standing in the prow, her eyes closed and a faint, beatific smile on the face that she raised to the rising sun. For her, this was a daily ritual, as it had been all her life.

  ‘The same sun shines on me here as shone on me in my village,’ she had once told him. ‘So, every day I am reminded that my homeland is still there. That thought comforts me. And one day, if the gods will it, I may be able to go back.’

  ‘And every day, when I see you looking at the rising sun,’ Piay had replied, ‘I am reminded of how beautiful you are and how much I love you. And if you ever go home, I will go beside you.’

  When he finally saw Myssa’s eyelids flutter open, Piay strolled up behind her and put his arms around her waist. Myssa leaned back against him and said, ‘Do you trust that man who calls himself a priest?’

  ‘The one who also calls himself Shamshi? The only thing we know for sure is that he’s a Hyksos, and that everything he has said so far about Imphotep’s riddle matches what we ourselves know. But do I trust him? No, not one little bit – in part because he’s a Hyksos. But also, there’s just something about his eyes . . .’

  ‘How they never laugh, even when he does? It is because he is always calculating. Maybe the Hyksos have sent him to test us. He gives us information and watches our reactions to see how much we know and how much of a threat we might be.’

  ‘Like the Sons of Apis last night, testing our defences,’ Piay said.

  ‘Well, I would not know,’ Myssa replied, in a tone that gave Piay the sense that he had just poked a hornets’ nest. ‘I was sent down into the belly of the ship, away from all the fighting. Do you really see me as such a helpless little woman?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Piay fought back. ‘I see you as someone who is so vital to the success of the task that Taita has given us that her safety cannot be risked.’ He stepped right up to her and lowered his voice. ‘Particularly when she is carrying the Eye of Horus that may be the key to the entire mystery.’

  ‘Huh!’ Myssa was not ready to forgive him just yet. But she was at least willing to change the subject, just a little. ‘About Shamshi . . . There was one thing he did not mention last night, and I cannot decide whether that was because he did not know it or was simply choosing to withhold it from us.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Imhotep’s tomb . . . It would make sense that if Imhotep wanted to take his secrets with him, he would have them by his side on the journey to the afterlife.’

  ‘So where is it?’ Before Myssa could answer, Piay gave a half-whispered little ‘Ha!’ and said, ‘Stupid question. No one knows, or else the riddle would already have been solved.’

  ‘No one knows . . . for certain. But from what Taita knows, and I have been able to find in all the old documents I’ve been reading, the tomb is believed to be somewhere within the Saqqara necropolis, close to Djoser’s pyramid. But somehow, no matter how hard people search the necropolis, the tomb remains undiscovered.’

  ‘Well, the necropolis is not far from Memphis—’

  Piay’s words were interrupted by a cry from the ship’s lookout.

  ‘Fire!’

  A second or two later, he could smell the first acrid hint of smoke on the air. The lookout was pointing towards the left bank of the river and shouting, ‘Over there!’

  As he squinted in the direction the lookout had indicated, Piay spotted a crouching woman tearing at her hair and beating her fists upon the ground as she wailed. A second later he saw the cause of her distress.

  A man had been strapped to the frame of a shadoof. His head lolled onto his chest and there was a dark stain down his front: blood from where his throat had been cut. As the boat drew closer, Piay could see smouldering ruins of peasant homes and farm buildings a short way inland.

  He did not think it was the work of the Sons of Apis. What interest would they have in attacking a small farming village? But still, there was something about that body . . . Someone had gone to considerable trouble to display it in that fashion, where it could be seen from the river. What message were they trying to send?

  A small rickety jetty stuck out into the water, not far from the shadoof.

  ‘Pull in over there,’ Piay called to the captain. ‘I want to take a closer look.’

  T

  he moment Harrar realised what was happening, he started complaining.

  ‘What’s the meaning of this? Why are we slowing down? I do not want to spend a single moment longer on this smelly, flea-bitten barge than is absolutely necessary!’

  ‘My lord, we need to find out what has happened here,’ Piay replied.

  ‘It is perfectly obvious what has happened. Some sort of disreputable bandit gang has attacked and killed a few farmers. The affairs of criminals and peasants are no concern of mine . . . or of yours.’

  ‘Surely the killing of innocent farming folk is always of concern to those who govern this kingdom. And if there are groups of bandits at large, laying waste to the land, should Pharaoh not know about it? I am certain that Lord Taita would wish to know. And I for one would not want to find myself before him, explaining why I had ignored such a tragic event.’

  If there was one thing that was likely to worry Harrar, it was the possibility of his life becoming even fractionally less comfortable. He would not want to fall out of favour at the royal court. He sighed and gave one of his airy, dismissive waves of the hand.

  ‘Very well, then, if you must. But be quick about it.’

  A few minutes later Piay, Myssa and Hannu were walking along the jetty, heading for the shadoof. Half a dozen guardsmen had come with them, just in case.

  ‘Don’t like the look of that,’ Hannu said as they drew closer to the hanging body. ‘Two farmers get into a fight, it turns nasty and one of them ends up dead. The last thing the killer wants to do is stick the body up on a bloody shadoof. He’s going to hide it away or bury it somewhere.’

  ‘How about bandits?’

  ‘No. They want to get in, take what they want and get out again, fast as possible.’

  ‘I agree – so someone did this to let the world know they were here. Like a warning of what they can do.’

  ‘Aye. And who would that be?’

  Piay followed Hannu’s searching gaze as it swept across the fields.

  ‘Some straggling Hyksos troops, trying to loot whatever they can before they flee back home?’ he mused.

  ‘Perhaps. But they wouldn’t slit that farmer’s throat. They’d stick a sword in his guts or chop off his head with an axe. Then rape all the women, steal all the food and flee. Oh, and before you say anything, no, I don’t think it’s those bastards with tattoos. They’re evil and they’re dangerous, but they’ve got no more interest in common people than that gutless son of a concubine over there on the boat.’