Chapter 3 - WIP1

Here is the third chapter of my untitled Egyptian spy thriller. The young slave boy continues to travel south after the death of his master, the elderly priest Gatsu.

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3
 
The quarry was visible from two miles away, a dark red mound rising over the green swathe of vegetation. A gentle curve in the progress of the Nile meant that for an hour he seemed to be walking alongside the stone outcroppings, but it was not until he was closer that he could see in detail their artificial appearance. The red granite was not smooth or eroded; it had been cut many times to remove angular blocks and now looked much like a building itself, divorced from the organic shapes of its landscape.

The quarry was some way back from the river and higher than the Nile would rise during the flood. A flat road of finely crushed sandstone had been laid, reaching into the quarry and proceeding at a constant, shallow gradient until it dipped smoothly into the water.

As he approached, he saw men heaving a stone. It was a mottled red-black, though the dust made it more grey than any other colour. It had been hewn from the rock face of the quarry and had been given only a cursory shaping. The block was two feet long by a foot wide – a size suitable for a bust of the pharaoh or a small statue of a god, such as had been in the temple at Djeba – but it still took four men to pull the stone using ropes. Two more were attentive with long sticks to act as wedges when the stone became occasionally lodged on the road. A seventh and final man supervised them. He moved around the stone, from the front to the back of the team, always watching, alternating commands to keep their burden sliding at a controlled speed.

The men were Nubian. They worked naked except for the supervisor, whose sole concession to modesty was a loin cloth matched with a pair of leather sandals.

Their skin and close-cropped hair shone with sweat, though where the dust of the road had risen it stuck to them and they, like the stone, were ashen.

At the foot of the ramp, a boat had been moored on top of the submerged road. A large wooden post had been sunk into the ground and a second post sat across it at a right angle, secured by a bronze spike as thick as a man’s forearm. It had been created to enable stones to be lifted from the road and onto ships. The wooden posts themselves had been imported from the far south – no trees in Egypt grew so tall or straight.

The supervisor saw him first, but made no acknowledgement and permitted no interruption of the work. The stone was secured. It took all six of the men to lift it using ropes and pulleys, then to lower it down onto a platform on the narrow wooden boat. It creaked and crackled under the weight and sank further into the water. Only when the ropes were untied did the supervisor turn his attention to the boy in the white skirt carrying the heavy pack.

Everyone was watching him, even the crew of the ship – which was a shorter vessel than might be used to carry stone on the Nile beyond the first cataract, and was better suited to travelling up river where the navigable ways were more narrow. The crew were all Nubians and likewise did their work without clothing.

The boy cleared his throat and in his best Nubian he hoped he said, “Hello, I am looking for Artam.”

A deep and profound silence settled, and he found himself scrutinised by unfriendly eyes.

“You are Egyptian,” the supervisor said. He was a tall man – half a head above any of the men around him and all of those would be considered large men by Egyptian standards. He was neither old nor young but possessed the confident command of a man who had earned the respect of others.

“Yes, I am.”

“You are far south, Egyptian.”

There was no war between the pharaoh and the Nubians. They did not have a king, or any great chief who could be said to rule over a scrap of land bigger than what he could see from standing on flat ground. Infrequently the Egyptians took slaves from Nubia, and more commonly they bought the slaves the Nubians took in their own internal conflicts.

He could read resentment in their expressions. Having been powerless and inconsequential his whole life, nobody had ever looked at him that way before – as if he were responsible for those forces to which he was equally subject. By any fair assessment, including his own, the Egyptian boy was more done-to than doing.

Yet, if they killed him, nobody in Egypt would know. And even if it became common knowledge in every household from that quarry to the delta, nobody in Egypt would care.

“I am going farther; to the city of Artam.”

“The city of Artam?” the supervisor repeated. His men laughed, as did the crew of the boat. It was the kind of belly laughter that was not made in amusement, but in acknowledgement of something shamefully foolish.

“Did I say something funny?” he asked, sticking out his chest at little more, holding his head a little higher.

“Yes, Egyptian. You did,” said the supervisor.

He was standing on their road, calling from a distance of twenty feet or so from him to the nearest man. The quarry workers might be tired from their exertions – though they did not seem it, no more so than he was tired from carrying his pack all day. He might be able to out-run them and his furtive glances to the south gave every indication that he was considering it. But then he might not. And running might give them the idea that he feared them – a dangerous idea to give to people who he found so frightening.

What would they do to him? Laugh at him? Kill him? The Nubians at the temple had never said their people were cannibals – but that was exactly the kind of thing a cannibal wouldn’t tell you. Or, on discovering that he was a slave, would they seize him and sell him? 

There was nothing behind him in Egypt. A slave who returned with a story of his master eaten by a crocodile would himself be fed to the crocodiles. This was not a theory, it was normal, occurring perhaps once every two years. The idea was to incentivise the slaves to do everything possible to protect the priests. It also had the effect of encouraging slaves to misrepresent the frequency of crocodile-related deaths at the temple of Sobek – a place that maintained at least half a dozen large crocodiles at any given time.

Master Ibo was not bitten by a crocodile during a careless feeding but had fallen down the stairs a landed in such a way that his arm popped off at the shoulder and – in the panic that ensued – the arm had been lost. Master Merkha accidentally disembowelled himself by drinking too much beer – three slaves had sworn this to be true.

Two masters who vanished at the same time were – so the slaves said – living together as lovers in a house in the desert. Whether it was the forty-year age gap between the priests or the rotundity of a nearby crocodile that swayed the verdict more was unclear, but it was not the result the slaves had hoped for.

He could not go back to Egypt. Not as a slave nor as a free man. He had no trade, no skills to speak of, and his ability to read and write extended only to the letter owl. If he was to seek his fortune, he had to go south. To a place where there were no gods. A land where no-one had any experience of the priests of Egypt.

The boy cleared his throat and asked, “How much is your stone?”

“Why would you need to know the price of my stone?” asked the supervisor.

He tilted his chin higher, lifted his brows slightly, as he had seen so many of the masters do when dealing with tradesmen. “I am a priest. When I get to Artam I will raise a temple there.”

“You are a child,” said the supervisor.

“I am a priest of Sobek the crocodile god.”

“He must be a small god if he has such small priests,” shouted one of the boat crew. Everyone laughed.

“You should learn to respect the god. Sobek is god of the Nile and god of semen.”

“I am the god of semen around here,” the crewman yelled, grabbing his own testicles and shaking them jovially. There was some truth in his statement; the man was, as far as could be judged at distance, possessed of the largest testicles of any of the men assembled. Though this might be proof of his masculinity it could also be a sign of parasitic infestation.

In the temple in Djeba, a slave would have been beaten for speaking impolitely to a priest, or even to one of the noviciates training to become priests. He knew this – it had happened to him several times. Many times. More times than he knew the numbers to count. He had never heard of anyone shaking their testicles at a priest before, but this would surely have earned a more severe punishment.

“Sobek will punish you for disrespecting his priest.” Abstract threats were always useful for priests, because whenever something bad happened to an offender later, the priest could point to it as divine justice. Neglect your donations to the temple, crocodile bites your leg off – justice. Blaspheme against the gods, donkey kicks you in the head – justice. Murder your wife, break a pot – justice. Vague justice was always imminent.

“You are not in Egypt anymore,” said the crewman. He climbed up onto the side of the boat, the better to proclaim his displeasure, and he rose exulting, “Fuck Egypt!”

The others in the boat shouted, “Fuck Egypt!” and other short, easy-to-shout phrases that conveyed an abiding dislike of the land to the north. “Egypt drinks our piss!” “The pharaoh fucks his daughters!”

“Fuck the gods of Egypt!” the crewman continued. “And fuck you, little priest. Fuck all the gods of Egypt, fuck you, and fuck Sobek in his—”

There were only a handful of options regarding the exact form of dishonour the crewman intended for the crocodile god, but no-one would ever know for sure. He was plucked from where he was standing on the edge of the boat – by a crocodile. It leapt up some five feet from the still surface, sheltered from the flow of the river by the moored boat. The booming snap came as its jaws closed on his arm at the shoulder, and when it fell back into the water the crewman went with it.

The splash was large, but the water by the boat was deep. As soon as the spume dispersed there was no visible sign of the crewman. He had been taken so fast he had not even bled onto the place he had been standing. Ten seconds of silence passed and when nothing was said it became clear that there would be – could be – no attempt to save him.

Every head turned back to the shore.

The boy considered what a priest would do under such circumstances, then he did it.

He rose his finger to the sky to focus attention on him and declared, “Justice!”

All the men who had blasphemed against Sobek ran towards his priest and fell into the dust. Apologies spilled from their lips when those lips were not kissing the hem of his shendyt.

“Bread and beer for ten men for five days,” said the supervisor. “For a block that size.”

“Thank you,” he said with a sage nod, though his previous life as a slave had not given him the knowledge to judge whether this price was the height of generosity or the most perfidious depth of thievery.

“I am Ayo,” said the supervisor. “What is your name, priest of Sobek?”

​The boy replied, “I am Gatsu.”