Desert God. Wilbur Smith

      She wrapped her fingers tightly around it. ‘I don’t want any man to fall in love with me,’ she replied firmly.

      ‘Why not, my sweetling?’

      ‘Because if they do, then they try to put a baby inside you. When the baby is in, it does not want to come out again. I have heard the women in the harem scream, and I don’t want that.’

      ‘One day you may change your mind.’ I smiled. ‘But the stone has other qualities that make it special.’

      ‘Tell us. Why is it so special, Taita?’ Bekatha was not deterred by her sister’s silly scruples.

      ‘One reason is because it is the hardest thing in the entire world. Nothing can cut it, and nothing can scratch it, not even the sharpest bronze dagger. That’s why they call it diamond: “the Hard One”. Water cannot wet it. But it sticks to the skin of the woman who owns it like magic.’

      ‘I don’t believe you, Taita.’ Tehuti looked dubious. ‘It’s another of your made-up stories.’

      ‘You just wait and see if what I tell you is true. But remember …’ I wagged my finger at her sternly. ‘… don’t ever show it to a man unless you love him very much, and you want him to love you forever.’ I will never know why I told her that, except that the girls love my stories and I never like to disappoint them.

      I stood up from the tub and called for Rustie, my head slave, to bring a towel to dry me.

      ‘You are going away again, Taita,’ Tehuti accused me. She has a grown woman’s instincts. ‘You come back for just an hour, and then you are gone again. Perhaps this time it will be forever.’ She was close to tears.

      ‘No! No!’ I dropped the towel and embraced her. ‘That is not true. I am going only as far as your father’s empty tomb on the east bank.’

      ‘If you are telling the truth, then let us come with you,’ Bekatha suggested.

      ‘Oh, yes please! Let us come with you, dear Taita,’ Tehuti insisted.

      I paused to consider the suggestion, and I found that it appealed to me as much as it seemed to do to my girls.

      ‘There is just one problem with that idea.’ I feigned reluctance. ‘What we are going to do is a big secret and you will have to swear not to tell anyone else about what you see and what we do there.’

      ‘A secret!’ Bekatha cried and her eyes sparkled at the thought. ‘I swear, Taita. I swear by all the gods I shall never say a word to another living soul.’

      The three treasure ships were still moored alongside the wharf at the entrance to Pharaoh Mamose’s tomb when the princesses, Aton and I arrived there.

      Zaras and his men had worked well in my absence. Following my instructions they had rigged screens of reed matting around the tomb precincts to prevent us being overlooked from the surrounding hills. I was determined to work all night to get the triremes offloaded. However, Hyksos spies might creep in closer under cover of darkness, and of course we would have to work by torchlight. The screens would be vital in maintaining our secrecy.

      Using the experience I had garnered at Tamiat, I had worked out in detail how I should best proceed with the offloading. Now I supervised and instructed Dilbar and a gang of his men as they fashioned heavy pallets of dressed timber which they prised up from the deck of the first trireme. These were eight cubits square and would fit into the hatches of the holds. Then on the upper deck of each ship I rigged tripods and pulleys over the hatches. From these my men lowered the pallets into the hold, where other teams of workers packed the chests of bullion on to them.

      Then the chests were hoisted up to the deck in batches of twenty, swung outboard and lowered to the wharf.

      ‘What is in those chests, Taita?’ demanded Tehuti. I touched the side of my nose in a conspiratorial gesture.

      ‘That is the big secret. But very soon I will show you what it is. You will just have to be patient for a little longer.’

      ‘I never like having to be patient,’ Bekatha reminded me. ‘Even for a little longer.’

      A long line of men received the chests as they were unloaded from the pallets. The line stretched from the wharf through the entrance to the tomb, down four flights of stairs, and then along the painted and decorated tunnels, through the three vast antechambers until they reached the four treasuries. The treasuries were sited closely around Pharaoh’s burial chamber with its empty sarcophagus awaiting the embalmed corpse which never arrived. This vast complex had been hewn from the living rock, an endeavour which had taken me and two thousand labourers twenty years to accomplish, and of which I am still rightfully proud.

      ‘You girls can be of great help to Uncle Aton and me,’ I told the princesses. ‘You can count and you are able to write, something that only one in a hundred of these other dolts are able to do.’ I jerked my head at the line of toiling half-naked men.

      The two girls entered into the roles of bookkeepers as though it were a game. They were delighted to show off their schooling.

      I had left instructions with Zaras and in my absence he had set up two heavy balance bars in the first treasury. Now Aton and I each manned one of these. As the chests were suspended from the arm of the apparatus we called the weight to the girls. Bekatha worked with Aton while I had Tehuti as my assistant. They wrote down each weight on a long roll of papyrus and kept a running total after every tenth chest.

      When the first treasury was filled it contained 233 lakhs of pure silver. I sent the men up to the surface and gave them an hour to rest, eat and drink. When we were alone in the treasury I took the respite to make good my promise to the girls to show them what the chests contained. I prised open the lid of one and took out an ingot, which I allowed them to handle and admire.

      ‘It isn’t as pretty as my necklace,’ Bekatha remarked as she stroked the charm at her throat.

      ‘Does all of it belong to you, Taita?’ Tehuti asked thoughtfully as she looked around at the stacks of chests.

      ‘It belongs to Pharaoh,’ I replied and she nodded seriously. I watched her making the calculation. She is good with figures. At last she smiled as she reached a total.

      ‘We are very pleased with you, Taita.’ She used the royal plural as if by right.

      When the men returned I put them back to work. They moved the balance bars to the second treasury chamber which was slightly smaller than the first. In this we found space to store a further 216 lakhs of silver.

      At this stage Zaras came in from the wharf to report that the first two triremes had been completely unloaded, but that there was still a substantial weight of treasure in the third and last ship to be brought ashore.

      ‘The dawn is close, Lord Taita,’ he warned me, for I had lost all track of the passage of the night, ‘and the men are almost exhausted.’ There was a trace of censure in his tone, and his expression was lugubrious. I thought to give him the sharp end of my tongue, for I am not accustomed to being criticized by my underlings, and I was myself tired, but not exhausted. Despite my willowy physique, my stamina is greater than that of most men, but I restrained myself.

      ‘Your men have worked well, Zaras, as have you. But I am going to call upon your indulgence a little longer. I will come to the wharf with you to assess how much remains to be done.’

      At this point I made a fateful mistake.

      I glanced around at Tehuti as she squatted on her stool behind me with her head bowed over her papyrus scroll. Her hair had flooded down in a dense golden wave to screen her face. She had not found the time from her labours to comb it up again.

      ‘Tehuti, you have worked like a slave girl,’ I told her. ‘Come with me to the surface. A breath of cool night air will revive you.’

      Tehuti stood up. She tossed her head and threw the hair back from her face and she looked at Zaras. He looked back at her.

      I