River god

  I was aware of an increasing excitement ru

  It was easy to see, when I stood at the top of the precipice, how the land was fragmented into so many tiny kingdoms and principalities. Each amba was a natural and impregnable fortress. The man on top of it was invincible, and might call himself a king without fear of being challenged.

  Arkoun rode up beside me and pointed to the mountains on the southern sky-line. 'That is the hiding-place of that horse-thief and scoundrel, Prester Beni-Jon. He is a man of unsurpassed treachery.' He hawked in his throat and spat over the edge of the cliff in the direction of his rival.

  I had come to know Arkoun as a man of not inconsiderable cruelty and treachery himself. If he conceded Prester Beni-Jon as his master in these fields, Masara's father must be a formidable man indeed.

  We crossed the tableland of the Amba Kamara, passing through a few villages of stone-walled hovels, and fields of sorghum and dhurra corn. The peasants in the fields were all tall, bushy-haired ruffians, armed with swords and round copper shields. They appeared as fierce and warlike as any of the men in our caravan.

  At the far end of the amba, the path led us to the most extraordinary natural stronghold that I had ever seen. From the main table of the mountain a buttress had eroded until it stood alone, a sheer pi

  This gulf was bridged by a narrow causeway, a natural arch of stone, that joined it to the tableland. It was so narrow that two horses could not pass each other on the pathway, so narrow that once a horse started out across the bridge, it could not turn round and return, until it had reached the other side.

  The drop under the causeway was a thousand feet, straight into the river gorge below. It was so u

  Perched on top of this pi

  Festooning the walls and battlements like pe

  King Arkoun called the crows his chickens. Sometimes he fed them on the walls, and at other times he threw their food from the causeway into the gorge. The dwindling wail of another unfortunate victim falling away into the depths was a feature of our life on the pi

  These executions and the daily floggings and chopping-off of hands or feet, or the pulling-out of tongues with red-hot tongs were King Arkoun's principal diversions when he was not playing dom, or pla

  As soon as our caravan had crossed the causeway and pulled into the central courtyard of Adbar Seged, Masara was whisked away by her female gaolers into the labyrinth of stone passageways, and I was led to my new quarters which abutted those of Arkoun.

  I was allotted a single stone cell. It was dark and draughty. The open fireplace blackened the walls with soot and gave out little heat. Though I wore the woollen robes of the land, I was never warm in Adbar Seged. How I longed for the sunlight on the Nile and the bright oasis of my very Egypt! I sat on those wind-swept battlements and pined for my family, for Memnon and Tanus, for my little princesses, but most of all for my mistress. Sometimes I woke in the night with the tears chilling my face, and I had to cover my head with my sheepskin blanket, so that Arkoun would not hear my sobs through the thick stone wall.

  Often I pleaded with him to release me.

  'But why do you want to leave me, Taita?'

  'I want to go back to my family.'

  'I am your family now,' he laughed. 'I am your father.'

  I made a wager with him. If I won a hundred successive boards of dom from him, he agreed that he would let me go and give me an escort back down the Nile to the great plains. When I won the hundredth game, he chuckled and shook his head at my naivety.

  'Did I say a hundred? I think not. Surely it was a thousand?' He turned to his henchmen. 'Was the bargain a thousand?'

  'A thousand!' they chanted. 'It was a thousand!'

  They all thought it a grand joke. When in a pique I refused to play another board with Arkoun, he hung me naked from the walls of the citadel by my heels until I squealed for him to set up the board.

  When Arkoun saw me naked, he laughed and prodded me. 'You may have a way with the dom board, but it seems you have lost your own stones, Egyptian.' This was the first time since my capture that my physical mutilation had been revealed. Once again, men called me 'eunuch', much to my shame and mortification.

  However, in the end the consequences were beneficial. If I had been a man entire, they would never have let me go to Masara.

  THEY CAME FOR ME IN THE NIGHT AND led me shivering through the passages to Masara's cell. The room was lit by a dim oil lamp and smelled of vomit. The girl was curled on a straw mattress in the centre of the floor, with her vomit puddled on the stone floor beside her. She was in terrible pain, groaning and weeping and holding her stomach.

  I set to work immediately, and examined her carefully. I was afraid that I would find her stomach as hard as a stone, the symptom of the swelling and bursting of the gut that would drench her insides with the contents of her intestines. There was no remedy for this condition. Not even I, with all my skills, could save her, if this was her affliction.

  To my great relief I found her stomach warm and soft. There was no fever in her blood. I continued my examination, and though she groaned and screamed with agony when I touched her, I could not find any cause for her condition. I was puzzled and I sat back to think about it. Then I realized that although her face was contorted with agony, she was watching me with a candid gaze.

  'This is worse than I feared.' I turned to her two female attendants and spoke in Geez. 'If I am to save her, I must have my chest. Fetch it immediately.'

  They scrambled for the door, and I lowered my head to hers and whispered, 'You are a clever girl and a good actress. Did you tickle your throat with a feather?'

  She smiled up at me and whispered back, 'I could think of no other way to meet you. When the women told me that you had learned to speak Geez, I knew that we could help each other.'