“He’s a bit battered, but if I’m not mistaken, what we have here is Prince Ramose, the pharaoh’s brother.”
The drumbeat stopped. The dancers stood still and turned to stare at the newcomers. Ramose glared at his captor.
“Kashta,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”
6
THE SONS OF KUSH
Hapu turned to Ramose in surprise. “Perhaps you’d like to introduce me to your companion, Your Highness,” Kashta said sarcastically.
“This is Hapu.”
“A soldier?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t like Egyptian soldiers,” said Kashta. He got up to inspect Hapu. “They kill our people.”
“He’s a new recruit,” replied Ramose. “He hasn’t killed anyone.”
Kashta walked around Hapu as if he was examining a donkey or an ox.
“Then we’ve got him just in time.”
Ramose shook off the guards who were holding him and walked up to Kashta. “Where’s Karoya?”
“I have no idea,” replied Kashta. “It’s not my fault if you can’t keep track of your slaves.”
“She isn’t my slave. She never was. She disappeared the day you escaped. Where is she?”
“She’s not here,” said Kashta.
“When did you see her last?”
“You’re the prisoner. I’m the one who asks the questions.”
Kashta reached out a hand to touch Ramose’s medallion.
“Very pretty,” he said, pulling it over Ramose’s head.
Ramose could hardly stand up, he was so exhausted. This last defiant act had drained him of what little energy he had left. As the barbarians took hold of him again, his knees crumpled and he collapsed into their grip.
“You’d better clean his wounds,” said Kashta. “We have a hostage here. A royal Egyptian hostage. We don’t want him dying. Not yet anyway.”
Ramose and Hapu were led to a thatched hut and someone bathed Ramose’s cuts and bruises. He could smell the sharp smell of the healing salve that Karoya had used on him before. It wasn’t Karoya who was tending him though. It was a Kushite rebel, who was none too gentle and seemed to enjoy making Ramose cry out as he roughly rubbed the salve into his cuts. He felt a gourd cup pressed against his lips and he drank a bitter-tasting liquid. He had no idea what it was.
Ramose lay down on a mat woven from reeds. There was nothing else in the hut. Hapu was whispering something to him, but he couldn’t quite hear.
Slats of sunlight penetrated the thin thatch of twigs above Ramose. The sun was hot. It took Ramose a moment to work out that he had been sleeping and, judging by the height and heat of the sun, sleeping for many hours. He looked around the flimsy hut. There was no sign of Hapu. His body ached all over. He felt like an old man as he struggled to get to his feet.
He tried to open the door but it was barred on the outside. The boy who was guarding the hut opened the door and let him out. Ramose blinked as he ducked through the low doorway and went out into the sunlight. Shading his eyes, he looked around. The rebels had set up camp inside an old fort. It was one of the string of forts built hundreds of years ago, but unlike the forts at Buhen and Semna, this one hadn’t been restored. The mud brick walls still towered above, but their tops were crumbling. Sand had blown into the fort over the centuries and clumps of grass grew here and there. What had once been neat rows of barracks and administrative buildings was now just a pile of broken mud bricks, half covered by drifts of sand. An area had recently been cleared and a few rough huts had been constructed.
“Ah, the prince has finally woken.” Ramose turned in the direction of a mocking voice.
The guard prodded him and Ramose went over to where Kashta was sitting in his throne-like chair as if he hadn’t moved since the previous day. The rebel was wearing Ramose’s medallion.
“Where’s Hapu?” Ramose demanded. He could not see his friend anywhere.
“For a prisoner, you’re very fond of asking questions,” Kashta replied.
“I just want to know that he’s safe.”
“You seem to have a great interest in this common soldier.”
“He’s a friend of mine. We’ve travelled far together.’
“He’s busy,” said Kashta. “Where’s the rest of his company?”
“All drowned. Your men must have seen the bodies.”
Kashta stood up and circled Ramose. There was no sign of the pleasant young man who had walked around the palace gardens with him. Ramose remembered how Kashta had tricked him. The humiliation made his face burn. Now Kashta’s mouth was set in a permanent sneer. He no longer wore an Egyptian kilt. Instead he wore a loincloth made from a piece of giraffe hide. His feet were bare and dusty. On the back of his head he wore a leather skullcap decorated with a number of ornaments carved from mother-of-pearl shell. The carvings were of animals: a crocodile, an ostrich, a strange creature with three heads.
A rebel brought a gourd containing a small helping of lumpy porridge and gave it to Ramose. Two other rebels were standing on either side of him. He tried to move into the shade, but they blocked his way. Ramose sat down on the dusty ground where he was and ate the food. They hadn’t given him a spoon. He was hungry. He ate the porridge with his fingers.
“How does it feel to be a prisoner?” sneered Kashta. “It isn’t very pleasant, is it?”
It wasn’t the first time Ramose had been taken prisoner. He didn’t need to be reminded what it was like. It wasn’t pleasant at all.
Kashta had a stone flake in one hand and a reed pen and ink block in the other.
“Write a message to your brother, the pharaoh,” he said, holding out the stone flake to Ramose. “Tell him you are held hostage by the Sons of Kush. If all Egyptian soldiers aren’t withdrawn from Kush, you will be killed.”
“It won’t make any difference, Kashta,” said Ramose, taking the writing materials. “I know you think I’m a useful hostage, but I’m not that important. The palace won’t withdraw troops just because of me. They want Kush to be under Egyptian control. This rebellion will only make them more determined to subdue you.”
“Will the pharaoh let his brother die?”
“Pharaoh is a ten-year-old boy,” said Ramose. “He’s not the one who makes decisions.”
Kashta’s sneer disappeared. “Who decides what Egypt will do? The vizier? The ministers?”
“The vizier is a good friend of mine and he would want to save me, but his first allegiance is to Egypt. The ministers don’t like me at all. They would probably be pleased if I was out of the way. But it’s not the ministers you have to worry about, they are just puppets.”
“Who makes the decisions for Egypt?” asked Kashta.
“My sister,” replied Ramose. “She is ruthless like my father. It’s Princess Hatshepsut who tells the ministers what to do and she has no sisterly love for me. She would be delighted if you got me out of her way.”
Kashta laughed. “I’m not a simple Kushite nomad,” he said. “You can’t fool me. Egypt is run by men, not a woman, a girl. Write the message.”
“I need water,” said Ramose, “to make the ink.”
One of the rebels brought a gourd of water. Ramose chewed the end of the reed to make a brush and dipped it into the water. He sprinkled a few drops on the stone and muttered a prayer to Thoth, the god of writing. If ever he’d needed help from the gods, it was now.
Ramose rubbed the reed pen onto the ink block. He sat with the ink-laden brush poised. He hardly knew how to address his sister. He certainly didn’t think anything he could say would stop her sending soldiers to attack Kushite rebels.
“Stop wasting time,” said Kashta.
Ramose started to write.
Hatshepsut, your brother Ramose greets you.
I hope that you and our brother are well—may he have long life, health and prosperity. I have been captured by a band of rebels who call themselves the Sons of Kush. You will perhaps be amused to hear that the leader of
the group is Kashta, our recent guest in Thebes. He demands that all Egyptian soldiers leave his country. If the oppression of Kush continues, he will kill me. I have told him that his demands will fall on deaf ears.
Ramose signed his name. The ink dried quickly in the heat. He handed the stone flake back to Kashta.
“It will take weeks for the message to get to Thebes and an answer to be sent back,” said Ramose.
Kashta smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty of things to keep you busy.”
Kasha sent Ramose to join Hapu, who was clearing sand. The rebel sat back in his chair and watched with pleasure.
The routine was the same for the next few days. Ramose and Hapu worked until midday and then they were imprisoned in the hut again. The thin thatch of twigs did a poor job of protecting them from the burning sun. The air in the hut was hot and stifling during the heat of the day. At night, it was cold and they had nothing but a putrid animal skin to keep them warm.
“We have to think of a way to escape,” said Hapu as he ate his meagre lunch of stale bread and dried fish. “I’ll starve otherwise.”
Escape was the last thing on Ramose’s mind. “I need to rest.”
He handed Hapu his half-eaten meal and lay down. He immediately fell into a heavy sleep where he dreamed he was on a boat on the cool Nile, but the river wasn’t in flood any more. It was as calm as a pond. No, the river wasn’t calm at all, the boat was being tossed back and forth by a strong wind.
“Ramose,” the wind whispered. “Wake up.”
Hapu was shaking him. “We have to try to escape.”
Ramose was finding it hard to wake from his hot, heavy sleep.
“Look, I’ve cut through the door hinges. We can get out.”
While Ramose had been sleeping, Hapu had been sawing away at the leather hinges of the door with a sharp stone.
“What about the guard?” said Ramose.
“He’s asleep,” whispered Hapu. “I can see him through the thatch.”
Hapu gently lifted the door and pulled it aside. He peered out cautiously and then beckoned to Ramose as he edged out.
The rebels usually slept after they’d eaten their midday meal. Their guard, a boy no more than twelve years old, was curled up in the broken remains of a mud brick store opposite their hut. Ramose looked up on the wall. There was one lookout sitting dozing under a makeshift shade. Hapu pointed towards a deep drift of sand that hadn’t been cleared yet. They ducked behind it and made their way towards the gate on their hands and knees. The heat was unbearable. The noise of the cicadas seemed deafening. Ramose couldn’t shake off his drowsiness. He didn’t know what Hapu’s plan was once they’d escaped from the fort, but he knew he needed to be more alert than he was now.
They got as close as they could to the gateway under cover of the sand and broken buildings. The cleared area stretched between them and the gate. Hapu looked around. The inner fort was deserted. Crouching low, he headed to the gate. Ramose followed him. They reached the gateway and then crept around the outside of the wall, flattening themselves against the crumbling mud bricks.
Ramose was beginning to think that they might really make their escape. His head finally started to clear as he imagined being on the river again just like in his dream. Then one of the young rebels emerged from behind a bush tying up his leopard skin loincloth. He was startled by the sight of the two Egyptian prisoners, pressed against the wall like lizards, but it only took him a moment to regain his composure. He pulled a dagger from his belt and called out to the guard. The dozing lookout jumped to his feet and raised the alarm. Hapu turned to run, but other rebels were already coming out of the gate. They were all armed with sticks and axes. Ramose looked at Hapu. The river would remain a memory.
As punishment for trying to escape, Kashta kept them confined in the stifling hut for two days. On the third day, the door was suddenly opened and Kashta stood in the doorway looking dark and dangerous with the bright light behind him.
“We’re going on an expedition,” he said. “I can’t afford to leave anyone behind to guard you, so you’ll have to come too.”
Ramose sat up dazed and blinking. “Where are you going?”
“I’m not about to tell you my plans,” said Kashta. “Here, you can carry my bows.”
He handed three bows to Ramose. “Your friend can carry the water.”
Unlike the other forts, this one had been built away from the Nile. It was perched on a range of inhospitable low hills. To the west, you could see the land that, hundreds of years before, had been cleared for farming by the original inhabitants of the fort. It was now barren and covered with drifts of sand. To the north and south, piles of bare rocks stretched into the distance. To the east, the hills gradually sloped down to the edge of the desert.
Kashta led the rebels and the two prisoners down from the broken gateway of the old fort. They were all armed, though Ramose noticed only a few of them had bows and daggers. The others carried roughly made stone axes and sharpened sticks.
“Don’t try to escape,” said Kashta. “My men have orders to kill you if you do.”
Kashta’s “men” chattered and joked. Like schoolboys, they pushed and jostled, trying to trip each other up. They headed down the steep path from the gateway and skirted around the lower slopes of the hills to the south.
The barren, rocky land was just as hostile as it had looked from the safety of the river. The rocks were sharp and cut through Ramose’s flimsy reed sandals. The rebels walked barefoot and didn’t seem concerned by the sharp stones which slid beneath their feet as they descended. The rebels laughed when Ramose slipped over.
They kept heading south as the sun got higher in the sky and the air grew hotter and hotter.
The rebels chattered noisily to each other or sometimes sang their strange rhythmic songs. They followed another path that slowly descended from the hills towards a grassy plain below. They were acting like they were on their way to a picnic, but Ramose decided they must be going hunting. After about two hours, Kashta held up his hand. The rebels stopped talking and moved forward more cautiously, ducking down so that the surrounding rocks concealed them. Ramose peered ahead, trying to see what they were looking at. Several hands pulled him down roughly.
“Get down, Prince,” said Kashta. “We don’t want our quarry to see us.”
They crept forward and finally Ramose could see what their target was. Below them, in a rocky valley which had been hidden from view until now, was an Egyptian encampment. It was actually a Kushite gold mine, but Egyptian soldiers had taken it over.
Egypt had its own gold mines, but Egyptians had become so hungry for gold that there weren’t enough mines to provide all the gold they needed. Kush was a wild and desolate place on the surface, but below its desert soils there was a wealth of gold. It was one of the main reasons the Egyptians had wanted to invade Kush.
Mining for gold was hard, backbreaking work. Ramose could see men chipping large blocks of stone from holes in the earth. It was a slow process using copper chisels. They dragged the blocks to the surface and then a fire was lit beneath the blocks so that they cracked and split and revealed the veins of gold. The gold-bearing rock was then crushed and carried away to be heated in a furnace to extract the molten gold. The people doing the hard work were all Kushite slaves. A dozen Egyptian soldiers guarded them.
Kashta signalled to his men to prepare to attack. First the rebels painted their faces, turning the joking boys into frightening warriors. They tied up their prisoners’ hands and feet so that they couldn’t escape during the attack. The rope was roughly woven from grass, but it effectively immobilised them. They were also gagged so that they couldn’t call out and warn the Egyptians. Then some of the rebels positioned themselves behind the rocks and loaded their bows. The rest held ready their axes and sharpened sticks.
Ramose looked down at the unsuspecting Egyptian soldiers below. Some were leaning on rocks talking to each other. Others were sitting in the shade carvi
ng arrowheads. He wished there was some way that he could warn them.
“I’m glad you’re going to witness this, Prince,” whispered Kashta. His face was striped with white and red. His eyes glinted with the anticipation of the battle. His mouth was pulled back in a wild grin.
Then, with a signal from Kashta, the rebels clambered over the rocks and down into the valley, yelling and screaming like demons. The Egyptian soldiers ran around in confusion, not knowing who or what was attacking them. The rebels shot arrows at those who tried to escape from the valley. Ramose watched in horror as two Egyptians fell to the ground.
The slaves were confused too. It took a while for the rebels to convince them that they were being freed. Many of them ran and hid. Some fell at the feet of their liberators, calling out praise to whatever gods they worshipped. Kashta yelled at them to join the rebels, fight their oppressors, but though a few joined in the fight, most of them stayed cowering behind rocks.
Ramose noticed one slave who wasn’t afraid. She was a female slave with short-cropped hair. Before the attack, she had been making bread over a small fire. She must have been a troublesome slave as her ankles were tied together. She let the rebels cut the ropes, but didn’t thank her liberators. She picked up a length of faded cloth and draped it over her head. Ignoring the chaos around her, she calmly found a leather waterbag and filled it from a jar. Ramose’s heart thumped faster inside his chest. He hadn’t recognised her at first. The short hair and the ragged kilt had fooled him. He was certain now. It was Karoya.
7
NIGHT AND DAY
Ramose felt a rush of joy. It hadn’t been due to his own skill or cunning, but he had found Karoya. He tried to call out to her, but his mouth was full of the stinking animal hide. He tried to get Hapu’s attention, but he was busily sawing away at his bonds on the sharp edge of a rock. He had to let Karoya know that he was there. He couldn’t run after her because he was tied hand and foot like a hobbled donkey. She was walking away. Ignoring all the noise and conflict, she was making her own quiet escape.