“What is it you want to know, Highness?”
“How exactly did you discover that I was still alive?”
The vizier smiled his crocodile smile. “I have spies all over Egypt. A little gold can be very persuasive. I heard that Keneben had hidden someone in a temple and then I learned that he was secretly arranging a position for an apprentice scribe in the Great Place.”
“Why didn’t you come and get me back then?”
“I believed Keneben’s plan was a sound one. You were far safer there than in the palace. I had tried to keep an eye on you, but I did not know that Queen Mutnofret would stoop to murder. If Keneben and your nanny had not taken the precautions they did, you would have been poisoned.”
“What about when I left the Great Place?”
“I lost track of you, I am afraid. I had people searching the country, but they couldn’t find you. It wasn’t until I heard news of tomb robbers in Lahun that my spies tracked you down. And then you slipped through their fingers again. Your skills at staying hidden are very impressive.”
Ramose laughed. “There was no skill involved. I was just blundering around the country getting into trouble at every turn.”
“Praise Amun, you are safe now.”
Ramose looked at the vizier. “Why did you go to so much trouble to help me?”
“I serve the royal family,” said the vizier. “You were the future pharaoh. It was my job to tend to your welfare.”
“Did you suspect Queen Mutnofret?”
“No, Highness. I underestimated her. I wasn’t concerned for your life, just your happiness. When your mother died and then your brothers, I could see that these losses affected you more than your sister. I did what I could to make them easier to bear.”
“I had no idea.”
“I convinced Pharaoh to delay your military training. I stopped him from taking Keneben to Punt with him. I saw to it that Heria, your nanny, stayed in the palace long after her duties were finished.”
“It’s hard for me to believe you have been looking out for me all this time. I thought you were my enemy.”
“It was necessary to be stern. I knew you had a difficult path ahead of you.” The vizier shook his head. “I didn’t know just how difficult.” Wersu stood up with a sigh. He looked old and tired.
“I’m sorry I didn’t recognise your concern, Vizier. I was a selfish boy then.”
“In the end I failed you. You were exposed to great danger. You did not take your rightful place on the throne.”
“It is the will of the gods, Vizier.”
“Aren’t you disappointed, Ramose?” asked Karoya, as she walked down to the palace wharf with Ramose two days later.
“No,” replied Ramose. “This is what was meant to be.”
“But all the time I’ve known you, you’ve been working towards taking your place as the pharaoh. It’s what you lived for.” She stopped and looked at Ramose. “If you hadn’t rescued me, you would be the pharaoh now.”
Ramose shook his head. “The gods decide who will be the pharaoh, not lesser queens, not even royal princes.”
“And you’re not unhappy?”
“No,” said Ramose, smiling at Karoya. She was wearing a beautiful gown and shawl made of blue cloth. It wasn’t in the style of Egyptian clothing. It had been especially made for her in the style of the people of Kush.
“The only thing I regret is that my sister has become a stranger to me.”
“I don’t understand what happened to her. When I met her, back at the tomb makers’ village, she seemed kind. And she seemed to love you.”
“She became greedy for power.”
“But she can never be the pharaoh.”
“No, but she sees Tuthmosis as being a weak boy she can control.”
Karoya shook her head. “I don’t understand these things.”
“Neither do I. That’s why I’m leaving Thebes. I don’t want to spend my life among such people.”
“The oracle was wrong,” said Karoya. “She told us that you would be the pharaoh.”
“No. She said I would achieve my goal. My goal was to see my father before he died. I achieved that. I also wanted happiness. I would never have been happy as the pharaoh, constantly at war with my sister, afraid for my life.”
“But you suffered so much.”
“And I learnt a lot, Karoya—about Egypt and about myself. I’ve realised that I’m an odd sort of Egyptian. I have a liking for travel and a desire to get to know barbarians. I would never have found that out about myself if I had stayed in the palace.”
“But being a fan-bearer sounds very dull,” said Karoya.
Ramose laughed. “I don’t actually have to sit at Pharaoh’s side waving a fan, Karoya. Fan-bearer on the Right of the Pharaoh is a title. It’s one of the highest positions in Egypt, next to the vizier. And Tuthmosis is happy to let me wander around Egypt and report on the situation at its borders. So he’s given me another title—Superintendent of Foreign Lands.”
“I’m glad you’re coming with me,” said Karoya.
“My first duty will be to deliver you back safely to your people.”
Vizier Wersu was waiting for them at the wharf. He smiled as they approached. Ramose still thought he looked like a crocodile, but he had learned to like the vizier.
“I have carried out your wishes,” the vizier told him. “Keneben will not be banished, but he is no longer the royal tutor. He will be posted in a lesser temple.”
“And Queen Mutnofret?”
“She will be confined in a remote palace,” the vizier replied. “It is more than she deserves.”
Ramose nodded. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to demand the death sentence she deserved. She was after all Tuthmosis’s mother.
“There is someone who wishes to speak to you, Your Excellency,” the vizier said.
A small figure with his head hung low came from behind the vizier. It was Hapu. The boy fell to his knees.
“I’m sorry, Your Excellency,” he said, with tears streaming down his face. “I let you down. I could not do anything to stop the coronation.”
“Get up, Hapu,” said Ramose. “And for Amun’s sake call me Ramose. There was nothing you could have done.”
“I could have tried at least. I was afraid of Princess Hatshepsut,” said Hapu, miserably.
“You were wise to fear her, Hapu. She is dangerous.”
“Why don’t you come to Kush with Ramose and me?” asked Karoya.
Hapu shook his head. “I don’t want any more adventures. I just wish I could go back to the Great Place and be an apprentice painter again.”
“I think that can be arranged.” Ramose glanced at the vizier. The vizier nodded. “It will be good to have you working on my father’s tomb. You can make sure the tomb makers do the job properly.”
“Thank you, Ramose.”
Ramose hugged his friend and then stepped aboard the boat. Karoya followed. The vizier, who was going with them as far as the first cataract, helped her aboard.
The boat pulled away from the wharf. Ramose waved goodbye to Hapu. Earlier, he had taken leave of his brother who had hugged him and told him he would miss him. He hadn’t spoken to Hatshepsut. He had glimpsed her in a corridor, but she had turned away from him.
“Was my sister involved in the plot to poison me?” Ramose asked the vizier.
“No, Your Excellency, but in the months that you were absent, she developed a greed for power. She thought that she would make a better pharaoh than you or your brother. She planned to rule from behind the scenes. Not even Queen Mutnofret realised.”
Ramose sighed. His sister was lost to him, but he had a brother now. He glanced at the vizier. And he had friends in very high places.
Karoya sat down next to him. Her face showed a mixture of joy because she was going home, and terror because she had to spend weeks on a boat with the Nile in flood. The boat plunged through the surging waters. Karoya held on to Ramose’s arm.
&n
bsp; The wind filled the sail and the prow of the boat cut through the waters of the Nile. Ramose breathed in the familiar air—moist, and laden with the smell of vegetation. He turned his face to the south. He was on his way to the very edge of Egypt and beyond. And he was eagerly looking forward to it.
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR
People who study ancient Egyptian history are called Egyptologists. They have written books about every aspect of life in ancient Egypt. Reading these books, I was able to find out what people in ancient Egypt wore, what they ate, how they travelled. Egyptologists learned a lot of this information from the writings that they found in ruins of temples, palaces and inside the pyramids. Some of the writing was carved into stone, some written in ink on papyrus or stone chips. Fortunately the ancient Egyptians liked to write everything down, so that a lot of writings have survived.
When people first started studying ancient Egyptians, they couldn’t understand their writing. A single stone inscription was responsible for unlocking the mysteries of hieroglyphics. In 1799, a stone was discovered in a village called Rosetta. On it was a decree from the year 196 BCE. The decree was written in three ways: in hieroglyphics, in demotic (another form of Egyptian writing) and in Greek. Egyptologists were able to compare the Greek writing, which they could read, to the Egyptian writing.
It wasn’t easy though. More than twenty years passed before someone managed to translate the hieroglyphs. A French man called Jean-François Champollion realised that the names of pharaohs were always written inside an oval shape called a cartouche. He found that this was true on all the temples and pyramid writings as well. Using this he was able to break the code of hieroglyphics.
After that, the writing on all the tombs, temples, papyri and stone chips that had been found could be translated. People began to understand the world of ancient Egypt a lot more. If the Rosetta stone hadn’t been found, we would know very little about the way ancient Egyptians lived and it would have been a lot harder for me to picture Ramose’s daily life.
GLOSSARY
Amun
The king of the Egyptian gods.
cataract
A place where a river falls to a lower level in a waterfall or rapids.
cornflower
A tall herb plant with bright blue flowers.
crook and flail
The pharaoh carries these. They are symbols of kingship. The crook is a short metal rod with a hooked end. The flail is a metal rod with strands of leather hanging from the top.
cubit
The cubit was the main measurement of distance in ancient Egypt. It was the average length of a man’s arm from his elbow to the tips of his fingers, that is 52.5 centimetres.
goblet
A bowl-shaped drinking cup with a long stem and a base.
gourd
The dried shell of a melon or similar vegetable, used as a bowl to eat or drink from.
Great Place
The area in Egypt which is now known as the Valley of the Kings.
griffin
A mythical monster which has the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle.
Hapi
The god of the Nile.
hieroglyphs
A system of writing used by the ancient Egyptians.
Horus
The god of the sky.
jasper
A dark green gemstone.
lapis lazuli
A dark blue semi-precious stone which the Egyptians considered to be more valuable than any other stone because it was the same colour as the heavens.
Maat
The goddess of justice.
mirage
A false image of a sheet of water caused by light being distorted by very hot air in the desert or on a hot road.
nomads
A tribe of people who have no permanent home. They wander from place to place according to the seasons and food supplies.
oracle
A person who can tell what is going to happen in the future.
Osiris
The god of the underworld.
palm-width
The average width of the palm of an Egyptian man’s hand, 7.5 centimetres.
papyrus
A plant with tall, triangular-shaped stems that grows in marshy ground. Ancient Egyptians made a kind of paper from the dried stems of this plant.
Pharaoh
The title of the ancient kings of Egypt.
pylon
A gateway with towers on either side that get narrower towards the top. There is often a pylon gateway into an Egyptian temple.
pyramid
A massive structure built of stone with a square base and four sloping sides that meet at a point. The pyramids were built as royal tombs for the pharaohs and their families.
sceptre
A rod held by a king or queen as a symbol of royal power.
scorpion
A small animal with a pair of pincers (like a crab) and a long curly tail which has a sting in the end of it. The stings of some scorpions are fatal to humans.
senet
A board game played by ancient Egyptians. It involved two players each with seven pieces and was played on a rectangular board divided into thirty squares. Archaeologists have found many senet boards in tombs, but haven’t been able to work out what the rules of the game were.
Seth
The god of chaos and confusion. Also, the god of the desert and foreign lands.
shrine
A box or a chest made to hold a sacred object.
sphinx
An Egyptian stone statue of a creature with the head of a person and the body of an animal. Usually they have the head of a pharaoh and the body of a seated lion.
tamarisk
A common plant of the ancient world—a small tree with thin feathery branches. The tamarisk plant still exists today.
Thoth
The god of the moon and writing.
underworld, afterlife
The ancient Egyptians believed that the earth was a flat disc. Beneath the earth was the underworld, a dangerous place. Egyptians believed that after they died they had to pass through the underworld before they could live forever in the afterlife.
vizier
A very important person. He was the pharaoh’s chief minister. He made sure that Egypt was run exactly the way the pharaoh wanted it.
First published in 2001
by
an imprint of Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd
Locked Bag 22, Newtown
NSW 2042 Australia
www.walkerbooks.com.au
This ebook edition published in 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Text © 2001 Carole Wilkinson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Wilkinson, Carole, 1950– author.
Ramose: Sting of the scorpion / Carole Wilkinson.
Series: Wilkinson, Carole, 1950– Ramose series; bk. 3.
For primary school age.
Subjects: Princes – Juvenile fiction.
Egypt – Juvenile fiction.
A823.3
ISBN: 978-1-925081-64-0 (ePub)
ISBN: 978-1-925081-63-3 (e-PDF)
ISBN: 978-1-925081-65-7 (.PRC)
Cover image (Luxor Museum Statue) © GettyImages.com/Hisham Ibrahim
Cover image (hieroglyphs) © GettyImages.com/Adam Crowley
Map by Mini Goss
For John and Lili
Other books by Carole Wilkinson
Ramose: Prince in Exile
Ramose and the Tomb Robbers
Ramose: Wrath of Ra
The Dragon Companion
The Dragonkeeper series
Dragonkeeper
Garden of the Purple Dragon
Dragon Moon
Dragon Dawn (prequel)
Blood Brothers
Shadow Sister
Young Adult
Sugar Sugar
Stagefright
Picture Book
The Night We Made the Flag
True Tales series
Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter
The Drum series
Black Snake
The Games
Alexander the Great
Fromelles: Australia’s Bloodiest Day at War
The Beat series
Hatshepsut: The Lost Pharaoh of Egypt
Find out about Carole’s books on her website www.carolewilkinson.com.au
Carole Wilkinson, Sting of the Scorpion
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