Then his camel, straining forward, drew level with Melchior’s, straining backward, and the two fell into even pace. And as they did so he realised the nature of Ilya’s gift. The scent assaulted him, the dominating scent of what he called the city stink. It was frankincense. In a curious way it represented all the alien way of life, the ritual, the king reverence, the god worship, the decadence of
the city he had made his own and yetdistrusted. And having it thrust into his hand by that woman, of all women, roused such a violent distaste in him that for a moment, wishing to throw it from him, he was unable to do so; he was paralysed by disgust.
“The brazen slut!” he said to Melchior as the two camels, order restored, moved forward happily.
“Accosting me with her stinking rubbish!”
Melchior sniffed.
“Rubbish? It smells like frankincense; believe me, in many places it is worth more than its weight in gold. This King—did you say his name was Herod?—would find that an acceptable gift, I think.”
“You give it to him, then,” Caspar said; and to his relief found himself able to move, to hand the package over.
“But so long as you carry it, try not to ride between me and the wind.”
hate the stuff.”
“On which side of you I ride,” Melchior said mildly, ‘is of no matter to me. So long as we move forward. Perhaps I should have told you. I am old, I need little sleep. I travel by night. Then, when the camel must rest, I take my reckonings by the star and mark my charts. You are young; you may find my way somewhat tiring.”
Never, since he was ten years old and about to be taken, as a great favour, on his first desert raid in the company of men, had anyone spoken in that mildly admonitory, challenging voice to Caspar. And then the voice had been his grandfather’s, the voice of a man tried and proven, tough as leather, tempered as steel. To hear the echo now, from this old man, so frail, so just-brought-back-from-death-by-starvation, so sharply snatched back from despair, wiped out Caspar’s mind every thought, every emotion except that of the primitive feeling of competition. Rome, Herod, Jexal, Ilya were all forgotten as he said:
“Ride ahead, my friend. And when you are tired, let me know.”
FIVE
EDESSA 400 miles Upstairs, in a cool airy room overlooking the terrace, the Lady had settled down to gambling, and downstairs her slaves were hoping, even praying that her luck might be good. Her temper, at all times disagreeable, became savage under provocation, and nothing provoked her more than to lose at games-unless it was the failure of a tenant to pay his rent.
Balthazar stood a little apart from the rest with his arms folded so that the stiffened fingers of his right hand were held between his other arm and his body in a cradling, cosseting gesture. He was a scribe, an accountant, and his right hand was most precious; its gradual, increasing disablement gave him great anxiety.
He was not praying for the simple reason that he did not know to whom, or to what to pray any more. Years back, in Tyre, he tried all the gods, and one after another they had failed him. He watched, with gloomy detachment as one slave killed a dove and offered it to Aphrodite and another took four bleached bones from a bag and arranged them in a pattern and made a ritual gabble. Poor things! Upstairs the dice would fall as they would, indifferent to anything that was done down here; and if they fell unfavourably for the Lady, tomorrow everyone would suffer, more or less. He Would suffer more than anyone except the Lady’s body slaves, for he must every day, sometimes many times a day, go and stand in the dread presence. He cradled his right hand a little more closely, remembering what she had done to it on one occasion, and might very well do again.
A great wave of hopelessness washed over him. Lately he had been prone to moods of miserable despair. Being a thoughtful man he attributed
this, in part, to his age; he was forty years oldand the last of youth’s hopefulness had drained away; he was no longer capable of feeling that around the next corner something better might be in store.
I have, he admitted to himself, been disappointed too often.
The first of his disappointments had happened when he was twelve, a happy though sometimes hungry boy living in some nameless part of Africa, so far inland that on maps he had studied later it was just blank space. It was near a great river, not the Nile, and his tribe had its home where the river spread out over the flat land, making innumerable wide muddy shallows where the crocodiles had lurked, one eye watchful above the water’s surface, ready to snatch at women who came to fill their gourds, and at men who came to fish.
The tribe had a god, the Great Crocodile, N’Zana. They believed that the ordinary crocodiles were his minions and that if they did certain things and observed certain rites N’Zana would favour them and keep them safe from his servants. Once a year, at a time calculated by the old wise men of the tribe, three girls, virgins, without any physical blemish, were chosen and taken to a special hut where, no matter how low the food supply might be, they were fed and kept idle in semi-darkness, so that at another date they might be brought out, sleek and fat; then they were oiled and garlanded with flowers, and to the beating of drums and the yelling of their fellow tribesmen, they were cast into the river and immediately torn to pieces.
Once a favourite sister of the boy who now bore the name of Balthazar had been one of the chosen virgins and he had not accepted it in at all the right spirit. His father had rebuked him, telling him that it was an honour to give a virgin to N’Zana, but he could not resign himself. All through the fattening season he moped and pined and when the day of sacrifice came he had hidden himself away and wept. Not long after, a woman going to the river for water had been snatched and drawn under and devoured and the boy, fearful of his father’s wrath, but curious and rebellious, had asked how could this be. The price of protection had been paid and where was the protection?
“You are my son,” his father said; ‘but you do not always obey me. That crocodile was a disobedient son of N’Zana. He will be punished.”
The forty-year-old Balthazar could tell himself that had he had any sense he would have learned his lesson then and there and spared himself much disillusionment. But at the time he had accepted it, and when, being twelve, he had been most painfully initiated into manhood, he had received his pierced crocodile tooth—the badge of a full man in his tribe—with pride, and had worn for some months; until the slavers came, in fact.
The slavers came in the night, and N’Zana made no move to save or protect the tribe who once a year had given him their choicest virgins, and at all times the choicest joint of any beast they killed, the tribe whose chief on ceremonial occasions had worn the symbolic crocodile skull. N’Zana, said to be many times larger than the largest crocodile ever seen in the river, and to have four times as many teeth, had not come up from his hidden place and lashed about with his great tail, or snapped with his great teeth. He had done nothing. So the huts were all burned, the very young and the very old were left to starve to death with no one to care for them; the others were marched off, their necks thrust into forked sticks.
They had marched for many days, a long chain of misery; some had died. Those who lived were taken to the banks of another great river, the one which Balthazar now knew as the Nile; and there they were packed into ships, as closely as fresh-taken fish were packed into baskets, and taken to a place called Egypt where everything was strange and terrifying and the houses were as many as, and as tall as, forest trees.
There someone had rubbed powdered chalk upon his feet and he had stood on a block and several men had fingered his arms and legs, forced his mouth open and studied his teeth. Later that day, with other boys of about his own age, he had been taken into one of the tall houses and suffered something worse even than the initiation rites. The pain had been terrible and very hard to bear, with none of the hope, the pride, which had enabled him to bear the elders’ slashing and slitting; that had been destined to make him a man; this was destined to make him something less than a man. All that the initiation rites had conferred this more agonising process took away.