The Law of the Desert

The sand, scorched to a fierce heat, had done worse than flay the soles of her feet; they were swollen taut and throbbing, and every swallow dragged a scrape of gritty dust down her throat, sharpening a thirst already past bearing. Dehydration had hollowed her so completely that she half believed she was already walking down into the underworld. There was no strength left in her.

If fortune turned, the sun itself might do the embalmer's work and make a mummy of her without any rite at all. If it did not, the hyenas of the desert would come and tear the flesh from her bones. A body left incomplete could not enter the realm of eternity. To be eaten by hyenas was to die twice.

She could not let a tale that began Once there was a woman named Pesejet, rejected by the goddess Meretseger end in the miserable line She defaced a tomb as she pleased, fled, and died wretchedly in the desert to become a hyena's meal. The thought of heaping one disgrace upon another sent a strength she had not possessed surging suddenly through her body.

The solar disk poured down a heat that seemed already to have begun the mummification of the still-living Pesejet, a blaze fit to dry every inch of skin—but she rose on the single resolve to survive and cast off the false charge. She looked about her. A speck of blue, very small, caught her eye.

An oasis. If she could cup that cool water in her hands and drink, the thirst in her throat would ease, and some of the hunger with it.

Enduring the pain of soles already peeling, Pesejet began once more to walk the burning sand. With every step the deep blue of the oasis—whose coolness and sweetness she seemed to taste without ever drinking—and the trees shaking their broad leaves around it drew a little nearer. Excitement took her. Wrists bound in wooden shackles, feet bare and the flesh stripped away by hot sand, she broke into a run at a speed no one would have believed possible.

At last the nameless oasis of the desert lay before her eyes. Tears standing in them, Pesejet scooped the water up in both shackled hands.

But the water slipped through her fingers in a puff of yellow dust. She followed that water—no, that sand—as the wind carried it off, and lifted her head. There was only desert, sheeted in red sand. The trees that had shaken their great leaves, the blue oasis, were nowhere at all.

The oasis that had felt like a god's own blessing, the trees that had promised cool shade—all of it had been a phantom of the desert.

"The desert is ruled by laws unlike those of the world of men. Phantoms and mirages snare a person easily. Those who swear they saw a monster with a lion's body and an eagle's wings, or a thing with a hyena's head upon a giraffe's body—they saw them, most likely, while lost in the desert's illusions."

The words of her wet nurse, Alida, came back to her. Emptied of hope, Pesejet lay down and gave her body once more to the sun's embalming.

The fierce light drank every last drop of moisture from her. Flesh failed, and the thread of thought was nearly snapped, when the shafts of heat beating down upon her were cut off by someone standing in front of her. She opened her eyes slowly. They had gone cloudy, and could not hold the figure who stood with the sun at his back.

"A crime..."

A low voice, pleasant to the ear. She had heard it before.

"Did you commit one?"

What had been a blur resolved, and the man on horseback came clear. Broad muscle across the chest, a belly hard as granite—the very man with whom she had shared a night of pleasure stood before her.

"You..."

She bit her lip, wretched that they should meet again while she looked like this, and a sharp wind sheared past her side.

An arrow slammed into the sand at her very elbow. A little more and it would have pierced her throat. Terror seized her, and she looked toward the direction from which it had come.

Bearded men with their heads wound in cloth were running in on them—many of them. The Shasu, nomads of the northern Sinai, who appeared so often in the tales Alida loved to tell as villains coveting Egypt's plenty and living by plunder.

Nearly twenty of them seemed already certain of victory in their numbers. The man who had set himself before Pesejet did not look as if any of it were worth surprise. Still mounted, he drew his bow, hauled the slack string taut, and aimed at the Shasu in the lead.

A bright twang, and the arrow was gone in an instant, punching clean through the center of the foremost enemy's throat. The Shasu pitched face-first into the sand without managing a proper scream. Leaderless, the raiders howled and loosed their own shafts.

Whether a comrade's death had ruined them, or whether that was simply the whole of their skill, their arrows only sliced the empty air and never found Pesejet or the man. He watched their flight, seemed to pick out the one among them who could actually shoot, and drew again.

A merciless thud, and an arrow stood in a chest. The Shasu who had been holding a bow toppled backward and ended in misery.

"Aaaaaah!"

Enraged, the raiders shrieked and this time came on with the blades they had bound across their backs. They had understood that numbers would not serve against this man—that he was an enemy they would have to face at the cost of their lives—and their fighting spirit burned.

At the sight of the Shasu coming with swords, the man barring the way before Pesejet seized the hilt jutting over his shoulder and drew a long blade. Astonishingly, he still did not dismount.

Pesejet saw it with her own eyes and could not believe it. Not a man in a chariot drawn by horses, but a man astride a horse by the strength of his own thighs, working bow and sword as he pleased. She had never seen, never even heard of, anyone attacking like that from the back of a horse—not a donkey. A horse.

The Shasu themselves looked utterly sickened by the sight of him galloping as he swung the blade. Even for men who had wandered far in the course of their raiding and seen a great deal, an Egyptian wielding a sword from horseback was a deeply unfamiliar thing.

After that, there was nothing left worth watching. Before they could so much as cross blades, his sword opened a raider's chest, cleanly parted the next man's head from his body, and drove so deep into the belly of a third—who was bellowing for vengeance and flailing his own blade—that the point burst out through the man's back. Some of the Shasu lost heart, flung their swords aside, and ran. They met the same end as their fellows.

Blood spouted from them here and there, staining the desert red.

He had sent every last Shasu to the underworld, and still he had not lost his immaculate bearing or the calm of his eyes. Pesejet stared, dazed, as he flicked the blade through the air and shook the blood from it. The red scattering across the sand, the sight of him still mounted as he set the sword at his back—none of it felt as if it belonged to this world. She wanted only to know who he was, why he had been passing this place, and where and how he had learned the sword.

The thought came that he, too, might be a mirage, and Pesejet lifted her face to the sky. A single vulture was crossing the solar disk, which still heaped its heat upon the zenith.

Was the vulture not the beast of Mut—wife of Amun, chief god of Thebes, and queen of the goddesses?

"Pesejet!"

Iuni came running from the direction the vulture had flown.

"If that vulture led me all this way for some meaningless prank, I was ready to wring its neck and pluck every feather off it..."

The vulture, which had been gliding at its leisure, suddenly wheeled and stooped as if it meant to peck out his eyes. Iuni changed his tune at once.

"Oh! Great incarnation of Mut! Thank you! May Thebes, city of the goddess Mut, prosper! May the name of Amun, husband of Mut, endure forever! May the light of Khonsu, son of Mut, be scattered over all the world!"

His Egyptian was perfect. He knelt abjectly, flung wide the arms he had freed from wooden shackles, and shouted the praise at the top of his voice. The vulture seemed satisfied. It ceased its stoop and sailed once more at ease across the sky.

"Why didn't you jump down from the cart sooner?"

The moment she brought up something that put him in mind of Sebua, Iuni snatched up a fairly large stone and took a stance as if he meant to bring it down on Pesejet's head.

"Uncle! Calm down! Use your words!"

"Hm? I'm breaking the shackles. You scared? Want me to leave them on?"

"Ah..."

She held her shackled hands out and turned her head aside. A moment later there was a crack, and a blunt shock traveled up her wrists. Iuni had smashed the wooden shackles with the stone, and at last Pesejet had the freedom of both hands again.

"That man killed all the Shasu by himself?"

"Yes."

"Did I just break those shackles where he could see? He's watched a criminal smash her bonds. What if he draws that sword off his back and passes some bloody judgment?"

At Iuni's words, Pesejet looked at the man. He was watching a falcon circling above his head.

"I just hope he rides on past. The gap in skill is so wide I don't even feel like trying him."

Iuni fretted as he looked over the dead Shasu, but the man who had been quietly watching the two of them turned his horse's head and vanished beyond the desert horizon.

Captain Yuwi of the desert Medjay, who had been hunting the Shasu across the land of burning heat—always on the verge of catching them, never quite—was rejoicing at a sudden stroke of luck. Was that not the black man from yesterday's report, the one who had killed the work overseer of Deir el-Medina, running alone across the desert? Take the Nubian under the warrant, and the road ahead would be smooth.

"Over there! Looks like he's joined up with someone!"

"Run! Show them the strength of the Medjay!"

The Medjay, who had briefly lost the Nubian, raced toward the stretch of desert where the black man and a woman could be seen. But a man on horseback was coming toward them. He was none other than Setheph, Supreme Commander of Lower Egypt.

"It is General Setheph!"

When Captain Yuwi, who had recognized him, shouted, the running Medjay all halted and made ready to receive him with proper courtesy.

"Where are you bound?"

Setheph, drawing near, put the question before any greeting.

"We were pursuing the Shasu..."

"I have already dealt with the Shasu."