Chapter 1 - untitled wip 1

I've been working on a book on-and-off since before I wrote The Wicker Man Preservation Society. The core idea is to tell a "spy story" in multiple timelines set in both the ancient period five thousand years ago and the near future, moving between those time periods. I thought I'd share the first chapter.

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1

“This symbol makes the mmm sound,” said Gatsu. The papyrus scroll lay across his knees and he pointed at the hieroglyph with a finger that was crooked with age.

“It looks like an owl,” said the boy. He knelt, sitting on his heels in the dirt in front of the old priest, and read the symbols upside down.

“It is an owl,” said Gatsu. “The owl makes the mmm sound.”

“But an owl makes an ooo sound. Why is the mmm sound an owl when an owl does not make an mmm sound?”

“Gods!” Gatsu said and lifted his ancient face to the newborn sun. “How can I teach such a curious boy?

They waited, but there was no reply to the question and the boy spoke again.

“I only ask because I don’t understand.”

“You will never learn if you keep trying to understand things.” Gatsu picked up the stick he used for walking. Waxed and embellished with geometric patterns – it was the finest walking cane the boy had ever seen, and he had cause to resent its craftsmanship.

Gatsu grunted as he pulled back his arm, and with some effort struck the boy on the side of his head. The attack had no sense of urgency, and the boy did not flinch, or even close his eyes. If he made any sound, it was only that of an object being struck.

He was not afraid. His hand went to the spot in his dark curly hair where he had been hit and came away bloody.

“If not the book, then the stick will teach you,” said Gatsu, but the end of the stick dropped into the dust after a moment. Master Gatsu had patience and energy for neither kind of learning. Though he had only become angrier as they had journeyed together, he was also increasingly frail. His beatings were less frequent and though it was the boy who received the cuts and bruises, at the end it was Gatsu who seemed defeated.

“I should have been given a slave who knew how to read. A slave who knew how to read would have been at least as useful as a donkey.”

Gatsu’s no-donkey was the third member of their party. It had been with them from the beginning, never leaving the priest’s side. He made frequent reference to it, extolling its virtues with the earnest conviction of rheumatic pain as his feet swelled, his joints ached, and his back curved under the weight of itself. Gatsu liked the no-donkey better than he liked the boy. The boy was not sure how he felt about being ranked third in importance behind a pack animal that did not exist. But Gatsu had spoken so highly of the no-donkey and so poorly of the boy that their hierarchy was established and could no more be disregarded than the no-donkey could be made real.

The boy put his bloody hand flat against his leg, making as little fuss as he could. Either it would stop bleeding in a moment and he would be fine, or it would not, and he would die. There was nothing to be done about it either way.

Yet Gatsu’s assertion bothered him. It was a twisting, burrowing larvae that ate its way through the soft flesh of his body, to sit on his tongue and dry its new-formed wings in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and it escaped, brightly coloured and unworried about the further beatings it might invite.

“If the priests of the temple wished me to know how to read, why was I not taught?”

Gatsu’s eyes bulged – in affront, in confusion, and finally in anger – until it seemed they might pop out of his head entirely. He pushed through his uncertainty and blustered, “Doubtless there are already too many slaves who know how to read. Someone probably recognised that you were too stupid to teach. As I now realise.”

“But there are no slaves that know how to read, Master Gatsu.”

“Yet there are plenty who know how to speak back!” Gatsu stuck out his chin, obviously pleased to have achieved a victory in this war of words with an illiterate boy. He seemed almost sufficiently invigorated to strike him again.

If any of the masters at the temple had ever described the slave Gatsu had been given using a single word – instead of a string of curses – they would have called him different. He was the only slave who knew how to irritate the priests with endless impertinent questions that made any who answered him seem foolish. As a monkey knew how to steal and a lark knew how to sing, antagonism was his born skill. He looked at the priests in a way that was not impertinent, but somehow ignorant of the concept of impertinence.

“I am sorry, Master Gatsu.”

“Of course you are sorry. I have struck you, that is why you are sorry. Do not think that I believe you are sorry to have so agitated an old man than he was forced to strike you. You have no concern for my wellbeing – though yours is ever-most in my mind.”

“I apologise for my thoughtlessness.” The cut on his head was small and the bleeding had already stopped. His hair had matted over the wound and a brown trickle marked his face and chest where the blood had dripped.

“If I had the strength I would beat you every day, because that is what you need. When we reach Artam I will employ a man to beat you when you ask foolish questions. And when you are disrespectful. And when you do not listen. This man will never want for other work. His wife and children will be fat. He will be buried in splendour.”

“Thank you, Master. Will you teach me, please, what else the scroll says? And I shall, if I may, remain silent and attentive to your lesson.”

“You may. Whether you shall, we shall see.” Gatsu stared at the boy for a long time, then made a grumbling noise that was not happy, but satisfied with its unhappiness. He returned to reading the scroll, using his finger to trace the markings up and down the page. “The most excellent High Priest of Sobek – he has so identified himself – proclaims that Gatsu of Adebju has been chosen by Sobek to bring his cult to the people of Nubia, who are known to be without the care of the gods of Egypt. To the people of Nubia, do not be confused by the age of Gatsu, for he is strong with the god of the Nile and the god of semen. By my hand, Neruphat, High Priest, so on and so forth.”

Gatsu rolled up the scroll of pressed papyrus and returned it to the leather scroll case in which it was kept safe alongside a dozen other documents.

“Do the people of Artam know that you are coming?” asked the boy.

“I am already exhausted, do not make me strike you again. Help me with my shendyt, I wish to go to the river to bathe before the sun is too high and the beasts become frisky.”

With the sun low in the east, the sandstone cliffs that marked the beginning of the high desert were still in shadow. Past those cliffs, perhaps a hundred and fifty miles, was the Red Sea.

Death was much closer.

From their camp close to the river, only the untended grasses and palms were visible on the west bank. Rising far behind the sedge and fronds, the western cliff faces were yellow in the morning light and as high as those to the east.

Beyond the western wall there was nothing but desert for as far as a bird could fly. This was the truth, and everyone knew it.

Gatsu left the scroll case where he had been sitting and stood up with much ceremony, leaning heavily on his striking implement. Once upright he was more stable and dropped the cane to the ground.

The boy took the edge of the old man’s pleated white skirt – a shendyt – an item of clothing worn by higher-ranking Egyptian men. As a slave, the boy wore nothing, and never had – unless he had been swaddled at birth by whatever woman bore him. The priest’s shendyt was stained cream-coloured by sand but was otherwise finely made from woven flax.

Gatsu was a mass of bony protrusions; his spine was twisted, and his ribs pressed against loose skin that bore the marks of wounds received in his youth. With the skirt removed, his penis was visible as a nub poking out of a brush of grey-black hair. His testicles, which hung half-way to his knees, were barely concealed even when he was clothed.

Against the brown flesh of his naked body was a second leathery pouch, held tight-closed with a long cord wrapped around its folded end, then tied around the old man’s waist. It never left his person and the priest had never opened it. The contents of that pouch were Gatsu’s secret, and he had kept it, though he had caught the boy looking at it several times. Like the other pouch, it hung slightly below the line of the skirt, but the boy saw it exposed regularly as it was the priest’s preference to have a cold bath once a day.

The boy folded the shendyt and placed it on the bedroll next to the head wrap that had served as his pillow and would be his defence against the sun in the coming day. Then he fell into line behind Gatsu.

The old priest stopped and turned. “Where do you think you are going?”

“To the river. To bathe.”

“You are covered in blood. You will bring crocodiles all the way from Waset.”

As the last city in Upper Egypt and Gatsu’s farthest knowledge of the world, Waset was a mysterious place. Invocation of the name made him feel worldly and its use was always accompanied by a knowing sneer. The effect was somewhat lost on the slave; until their current journey, the boy had never left the small, crowded town of Djeba.

Their trip up-river had taken them to places the boy had never heard of. As an idea, this excited him. As an experience, it left him underwhelmed. All the new and exotic locations were much the same as the town where he had spent his entire life. Temples. Boats. River. Fish. Bread. Beer. Being hit with a stick. Crocodiles. Gods. It was all Egypt. It just kept on going.

They were three days past the cataract and their destination felt no closer. As far as Abu they had travelled by boat, but when the slow and stately Nile became shallow, swift and rocky, there were no boats to take them farther. When the Nile was not in flood, the cataract was impassable. So they walked out of Egypt and into Nubia, carrying only such things as were precious and could be borne by Gatsu, or were essential and heavy and could be heaped upon the boy’s back.

The boy believed that if he were doing no-donkey’s work, he should receive the level of respect no-donkey was due. Gatsu disagreed.

“After I have bathed, then you may bathe.”

With these words, Gatsu resumed his slow trudge down to the river, through a steep and narrow parting in the reeds, where the bank had recently collapsed and the plants had yet to reclaim their lost ground. His footsteps left indentations in the damp silt, becoming deeper until he reached the water, which was dark and lazy about his feet. He walked in until he was waist deep, then with shivering reluctance submerged himself and rubbed at his body and bald head in a way that seemed practised rather than enjoyable.

The boy looked at the water flowing down the Nile, glistering in the light, moving with a sound that could be mistaken for silence – were it not for Gatsu’s splashing.

He could see no people on the river.

There were villages that dotted the riverside between the towns of Djeba and Nubt, Nubt and Abu. And between those villages there had been mud-brick houses standing in relative isolation. Along all the Nile in Upper Egypt there was no more than half a mile between one building and the next: a continuous line of habitation synonymous with security and with the protection of the gods and the army of the pharaoh.

There had been no individual homes for two days. This far south of Abu it was not safe for a man to live by himself, or to raise a family. There had been no villages for more than a day. They had come to a place beyond the pharaoh’s reach – though for all the distance they had travelled, the sun was the same, the earth was the same, and the Nile flowed endless from its unknown source to its unknown destination.

Nubians were not unknown in Egypt. The temple to which the boy had belonged owned Nubian slaves too – black-skinned, broad-nosed, wide-mouthed men and women. They spoke a different language, and it was only the accident of association that had allowed him to learn to speak it.

When Master Neruphat decided that he was a High Priest, and that Master Gatsu had to leave the temple for Nubia, the boy was selected to go with him. He had been told it was his job to translate for the local people. It was hinted that perhaps, in time – after many years of dutiful service – he could become a priest of Sobek himself. Such an honour could not have been bestowed on one of the Nubian slaves – and in any case their loyalty would be suspect when they were again amongst their own people.

“Get my stick!” Gatsu shouted.

The priest was wading out with urgent steps. The boy’s eyes went wide when he saw the shape in the water behind Gatsu and rushed to their campsite to retrieve the cane. He had run back as far as the top of the riverbank when an eruption of water and crocodile struck the priest of Sobek.

The beast was twice as long as the boy was tall. Its triangular mouth opened and slammed closed on Gatsu’s leg. The sound of the impact was combined with the crack of bone as the old man’s thigh snapped.

Gatsu made a feeble grasp at the grasses as the crocodile pulled him into the water, leaving him holding only torn reed fronds in each hand. The boy leapt down the bank with the stick raised high over his head and hit the beast on a row of armoured ridges that ran down either side of its spine.

The crocodile tossed Gatsu away and charged at the boy. Its green-brown banded tail thrashed in the water, its splayed legs and claws dug into the sand and pushed it upwards. The boy retreated, running backwards all the way up the bank. He hit the crocodile on the nose, fuelling the animal’s rage but doing it no more injury than with his first attack.

At the top of the bank, he tripped over his feet and the crocodile’s jaws snapped only inches away. Then again, furiously chomping at the air. He crawled away, regained his footing with the grace of a newborn deer, and held out the cane like a sword.

The route they had used to go down to the river was too narrow and as the crocodile had pursued it became wedged on either side, unable to ascend the final few steps that the boy and the thin priest had negotiated easily.

“You are not so smart, I think,” said the boy. He bopped the crocodile on the nose again, dancing back and forth. “You have got yourself stuck and you are not so scary when you are stuck.”

He attempted another strike on the great lizard’s head, but this time it caught the boy’s play sword as it came down and its teeth turned the cane into splinters. The crocodile made a hissing, growling sound and scuffed its feet, sending up a spray of silt. In the seconds that followed it was not clear whether the grassy overhang would hold, or the crocodile would break through and kill him.

It was said that a man could not outrun a crocodile, but the boy had mostly heard this said by priests of the crocodile god – who were obviously not impartial. He had already decided to give it a try.

The boy looked into the green eyes of the beast.

The beast stared into him.

“Sobek,” the boy whispered, “if you spare me – your servant – from this – your creature – I will—”

His vow was interrupted when the ground the crocodile had been standing on gave way. It slipped into the river with a splash. The bank was now so steep that even the boy could not have climbed it. And there was no reason to.

Gatsu floated face-down in the water. His heart had not been able to endure the excitement of the attack. Other submerged green shapes in the river made tentative nudges at the body.

The crocodile who had killed Gatsu, and would have killed the boy, emerged from the clouded water amid bubbles and flailing limbs and flashing teeth. It roared at the boy – a deep, booming hiss that disturbed the surface of the water and which he felt in his stomach and his bowels.

Circumstances dictated that their confrontation was over. The crocodile could not reach the boy. The boy was not coming down to fight. There would be none of the priest left if the crocodile didn’t claim its share. Glaring viciously even as it turned away, it slipped beneath the surface of the water, and its shape headed to the feast.

It had become clear to the other crocodiles that Gatsu was not going to struggle. They nibbled him at first, pulling off chunks and strips where they could. When one had freed a red clump of flesh, it tossed the morsel into its throat and swallowed with a bobbing motion of its head. The action looked like approval – as if they were all polite friends enjoying dinner and conversation, nodding at the considered points made by their fellows, appreciating the flavour of the food being served.

The boy flattened the grasses atop the ridge and made a seat for himself overlooking the feast. He had made two decisions that morning. He would watch the crocodiles eat the priest of the crocodile god – how often did anyone see such a thing? – and he would have a bath tomorrow. Or possibly never.

When there was nothing left of Gatsu, the boy went back to their campsite. It was more curiosity than intent which made him pick up the old priest’s shendyt and wrap it around his waist.

“No-donkey,” said the boy, “I cannot see my penis. What an amazing thing. This means that I am in charge now and you must do what I say.”

​The no-donkey did not object.