Authors: Scott Oden
Barca and Ithobaal stood at the edge of a muddy embankment, just inside a tangled copse of sycamores, and watched the lights of Memphis glittering across the dark waters of the Nile. “I’m going in tonight. Alone,” the Phoenician said.
Ithobaal’s knees creaked as he crouched and scooped up a handful of loose soil. “Alone? Are you mad?” He heard a cough, explosive in the silence, and glanced toward the noise. The Medjay sat in the darkness beneath the trees, too weary to prepare a fire or unsling their bedrolls. Eighteen faces stared at nothing; splashes of light from a sickle moon gave them a ghoulish cast, like wandering souls unburied, unmourned. Soil trickled between Ithobaal’s fingers. “This forced march has exhausted the men. It’s exhausted you. Why not bide the night here and rest until dawn? We made good time from Leontopolis. What difference will another day make?”
The city across the river consumed Barca’s attention. His answers were there, in the inscrutable darkness that thrived where the small circles of light failed. He continued as if Ithobaal had never spoken. “Get some sleep and enter Memphis at dawn, on the first ferry. Find lodging around the Square of Deshur and wait for me. I’ll get word to you when I have something useful. If any should ask, tell them you’re guards for a caravan out of Jerusalem.”
Under casual scrutiny the Phoenician could easily pass for an itinerant caravaneer. Clad in a threadbare tunic and sandals, a knife thrust into his belt at his back, he had shed his armor and shield and ordered his men to do the same. Their telltale
uadjets
would draw too many curious stares. A troop of Medjay in Memphis would place the Greeks on their guard. Barca needed stealth; he needed freedom to move about with as much anonymity as possible.
Ithobaal stood. His nerves were stretched thin, close to breaking. “How, in the name of horned Ba’al, will you get across the river, little brother? The ferries have ceased for the night, unless you’re Greek. You plan to swim the Nile?”
Barca clapped the Canaanite on the shoulder. “Have faith, Ithobaal. There’s more than one way into Memphis.”
“Then, why go alone? At least let a few of us accompany you. The odds …”
Barca shook his head. “The odds worsen with every passing moment. If twenty men follow me in, that’s twenty chances that the Greeks will get wind of us. We’re already playing against time. Once the Greeks hear about what happened to their messenger at Leontopolis, do you think they’ll sit idle? I don’t. I think they’ll set their plans in motion as fast as they can. Tonight, I’m going to find Matthias ben Iesu. If anyone knows what’s been happening, he will.”
“If the old Jew still lives,” Ithobaal muttered as he turned and walked back to the loose circle of Medjay. “I may be old, but I’m not daft, little brother. You’ve come to kill Greeks, and the gods preserve any who get in your way!”
Barca dismissed the Canaanite with a wave of his hand as he descended the embankment and headed south, following the curve of the river. Mud squelched underfoot. He forged a treacherous path around boulders and gnarled roots, risking a twisted ankle or worse should a slick rock turn under his weight. Papyrus stalks rattled in a faint breath of wind.
Barca withdrew into himself, his senses alert, his body moving over and around obstacles. Ithobaal was right. Exhaustion gnawed at him. His bones and muscles ached; his joints felt like they were spun from glass. Rest would have been a godsend, had it been at all possible. Deep down Barca could feel the Beast stirring, flexing its claws in anticipation. This dormant bloodlust was akin to having another living being inside his skin, a lean wraith whose hunger flogged him to action, despite pain or weariness. Barca knew he had come to Memphis to aid Pharaoh. No one could argue otherwise. Yet, the truth of Ithobaal’s condemnation stabbed like a white-hot knife of guilt. Had he also come to Memphis to gorge the Beast on Greek blood?
A short time later, a cluster of shanties emerged from the darkness: a mud-dweller’s village. Despised by their agricultural neighbors, the mud-dwellers were the poorest of the poor, a gypsy folk who drifted with the currents, who eked whatever living they could from fishing, scavenging, and outright theft. Their villages were barely habitable. Tumbledown huts of cast-off mud brick, roofed with reed mats and dried palm fronds, clung to the shore like barnacles to a ship’s hull. The village would vanish with the next inundation, and the mud-dwellers would vanish with it, scattered by the Nile’s indomitable will.
Barca plunged through the maze of huts. An open sewer cleft the village square, allowing slops and human waste to drain into the river. The Phoenician stepped over this fetid trench. Through curtained doorways he could hear the sounds of men snoring, the hard crack of a fist on flesh, laughter. In the distance a dog howled in pain.
Ahead, a ramshackle jetty sprang from the river muck, a leprous finger of wood prodding at the Nile’s breast. Small boats scraped the pilings, their oars shipped, sails furled. Barca crept out onto the jetty and peered into each boat. He found what he sought in the last one. A village boy lay curled around the base of the mast, his head cradled on a cushion of rope. He was young, ten years old at most; hard years if the long puckered whip scars lacing his shoulders and back were any indication. In one fist he clutched a small horn, chipped and worn from rough use, while the other held a knife made from a shank of corroded copper. No doubt he was charged with standing guard over the boats tied to the jetty.
Barca knelt. Gently, he prodded the young sleeper with the tip of his sheathed sword. The boy groaned, swatting at the intrusion. Barca poked him again. “Wake up, lad,” the Phoenician said. “I have a task for you.” At the sound of Barca’s voice, the boy’s eyes flew open. He scrabbled across the bottom of the skiff brandishing his makeshift knife, his horn held out like a shield. The boat thumped against the rotting pilings of the jetty. The boy glared at Barca, his mouth open in a soundless scream.
He was tongueless.
Barca held his hands out, palms up, in a gesture meant to be friendly. “Is this your boat?” he said, his voice low and even. The boy shook his head, nodding back toward the village. It belonged to his father, then. Or an uncle. Likely the same person who whipped him without mercy and cut out his tongue. A slow rage boiled in Barca’s veins. “Can you sail it?”
A vigorous nod. The boy stared at Barca’s sword, his initial fear replaced by curiosity. He pursed his lips and extended a trembling hand. His body tensed; he expected to be slapped away, beaten for his presumptions. Barca surprised him by letting him run his fingers along the edge of the sheath.
“Like swords, do you?”
The boy grinned. He clambered to his knees and puffed out his chest, his little knife held aloft. Whatever he mimicked must have come from a Greek story. The Egyptians were dismissive of heroic tales. Their heroes’ deeds were for the good of Egypt rather than glory’s coarse rewards.
“You’ll make a fine Achilles,” Barca said. “But you’ll need a better blade.” Barca reached around and tugged the knife from the small of his back. It was a superb weapon, the curved iron blade inlaid with a tracery of gold vines and set in a hilt of yellowed bone. Avarice gleamed in the boy’s dark eyes.
“I’ll give you this,” Barca said, “if you take me across the river.”
The boy chewed his lip. He looked from the knife to Barca’s face and back again. The Phoenician could see nothing naive in the boy’s manner. If caught filching the boat, his elders would administer fresh beatings, perhaps even deprive him of more than his tongue. The knife, though … in his world a knife like that could save his life. Barca reckoned the boy no fool. After a moment’s thought the youngster agreed and gestured for the Phoenician to hurry. Barca climbed down into the skiff, untied their moorings, and shoved away from the jetty as the boy raised the patchwork sail.
They drifted slowly toward the center of the river, a night breeze tugging at the sail as the boy used an oar to keep them on course. Like an old sailor, the lad navigated against the current, following Barca’s hand gestures. The wind drove them south, past the mouth of the canal that led to the royal quays, past clusters of ships tied for the night to mooring posts. Barca discerned the Mansion of Ptah, with its soaring ramparts backlit by the countless torches left burning throughout the night. Past the temple, trees lined the rising bank, screening slums and villas, alike. A short time later, the Phoenician caught sight of his goal.
“There. Get me as close as you can.”
His destination was the Nilometer, an angled stone staircase cut into the high bank of the Nile. Steps chiseled with hieroglyphs measured the level of water from season to season. Life in Egypt, all life, depended upon the rhythms of the river, on the annual inundation of the Nile. Low floods were harbingers of famine; high floods promised ruin. A perfect inundation meant granaries full of emmer, cisterns full of beer, and a year of prosperity for all.
The boy inched the nose of the skiff into the Nilometer until the hull scraped stone. Barca clambered out of the boat and gripped the prow. Cool water lapped at his ankles. He paused before handing the lad his knife. “Forget you saw me,” he said. The boy nodded, flashing a gap-toothed smile. He accepted his prize as if it were given for valor. Barca gave the boat a shove, watching it spiral out into the river. Satisfied the boy would find his way home, the Phoenician turned and ascended the algae-slick stairs of the Nilometer.
The mouth of the Nilometer lay inside the walled enclosure of the temple of Osiris, on the southern edge of Memphis. Through a dark veil of palm trees, Barca saw the glimmer of white stone marking the ceremonial entrance of the temple; to his right lay a scattering of chapels and outbuildings. Though the sanctuary was dedicated to Osiris, the temple grounds housed countless other gods, along with shrines to the deified pharaohs and tombs of high-ranking priests.
The folk of Egypt, Barca reckoned, were religious to the point of excess. Ritual and magic permeated their lives. Mothers taught their daughters prayers to insure bread would not burn, milk would not spoil, and children would sleep through the night. Fathers passed along to their sons the words of power that would make crops grow, arrows fly true, and crocodiles look the other way. The wealthy knew dozens of incantations that would keep their gold safe; the poor knew just as many to make that gold safe to the touch. This unquestioned faith in the unseen, in the divinity of Pharaoh, and in the gods, was the force that bound Egypt into a unified whole.
Barca slipped out of the Nilometer and followed the circuit of the wall. He came to a small side gate that opened on one of the city’s infamous winding alleys and stopped, listening. No priests stirred about at this late hour; no suppliants came to beg Lord Osiris for succor in the next world. The only sounds came from the wind rustling through the trees and the commotion of the nearby Foreign Quarter. The Phoenician drew the wooden bolt and slipped out the gate.
He felt a momentary flash of claustrophobia. Accustomed to the wide-open sky of the Eastern Desert, Barca felt surrounded by those ancient mud brick walls. A thin strip of starlight overhead mocked him. Clenching his teeth, stifling the fear that somehow the buildings would collapse on him, Barca set off at a trot.
He headed west, crossed a broad lane lined with human-headed sphinxes, and plunged into the tangled warren of the Foreign Quarter. Barca’s informant lived on the southern edge of this turbulent district, on the Street of the Chaldeans, in the shadow of a solitary obelisk known as the Spear. At least, Barca hoped Matthias ben Iesu still dwelt there. Five years had passed since his last visit; five years could encompass a lifetime in a city such as Memphis, a city in a state of constant flux. Barca chided himself for not maintaining contact with the aging Judaean. If he had, perhaps he could have squashed this potential crisis months ago.
Barca ghosted down the alley, past doors and windows, past mud brick crevices and jagged chasms that yawned like the gates of Hades. The heat, coupled with the stench rising from a thin runnel of sewage, made his lungs ache. Sweat drenched his tunic; stinking muck caked his sandaled feet. It was like moving through the bowels of a stone leviathan. After an hour, he knew he must be closing in on his destination.
The alley turned sharply and widened, becoming a small irregular square. To his right, gleaming like an alabaster spike above the skyline, Barca caught sight of the Spear. The obelisk belonged to an ancient temple facade, its stone cannibalized during one of the interregnums of pharaonic power. Now it stood isolated, a reminder of darker times. Barca glanced around the square. He wasn’t alone. Shapes huddled in the corners; he heard muttered curses, smelled the raw stench of human waste. From the shadows at his feet, a filth-encrusted hand plucked at the Phoenician’s tunic.
“Mercy,” a voice wheezed in Egyptian, densely accented. “Mercy for an old soldier?”
Barca brushed the hand aside. A few other pitiful forms leaned out and importuned him, begging for coin. Like the mud-dwellers, the beggars of Memphis were a caste unto themselves, an indigenous population who slipped through the cracks of Egypt’s rigid society. They were the insane, the infirm, the solitary, cast aside and forgotten as their usefulness waned.
This could be my fate
, Barca thought, feeling a glacial abscess in the pit of his stomach. He glanced down at the beggar. “A soldier, you say?”
“Aye,” the beggar said, crawling to his knees. A cloud of flies rose from his filthy nest. “Much younger, I was. Carried spear and shield in the company of Lord Huy of Bubastis.” The beggar exhaled, a wheezing chuckle that reeked of rotted onion.
“I’m a soldier, as well, and I need to know if a man still lives nearby. A Judaean …”
“The astrologer!” The beggar pawed at Barca’s belt. His fingers brushed the Phoenician’s sheathed scimitar and jerked away as if burned. “You’re Phoenician … yes, he told us to be expecting you. He told us you’d be seeking the Jew. ”
“Who? Who told you?”
“The man with the copper bangles.”