I had no time to be gentle. He was dying in my arms.
“Where did Nekoptah take Helen?”
“Osiris… Osiris…”
I shook the poor old dying man. “Look at me!” I demanded. “I am Osiris.”
His eyes widened. Feebly, he tried to reach for my face with one limp hand. “My lord Osiris…”
“Where has the false priest Nekoptah taken the foreign woman?” I demanded.
“To your temple… at Abtu…”
That was what I needed to know. I lay Nefertu’s gray head down on the painted tiles of the floor. “You have done well, mortal. Rest in peace now.”
He smiled and sighed and stopped his breathing forever.
The temple of Osiris at Abtu.
I went to Prince Aramset and told him what had happened. “I cannot leave the palace, Orion,” he said. “Nekoptah’s spies and assassins may be anywhere. I must remain here with my father.”
I agreed. “Just tell me where Abtu is and give me the means to get there.”
Abtu was a two-day chariot drive north of the capital. “I can have fresh horses ready for you every ten miles,” the prince said. Then he offered me Lukka and his men.
“No, they are your personal guard now. Don’t strip yourself of their loyalty. A charioteer and relays of fresh horses will be all I need.”
“Nekoptah won’t be alone at Abtu,” warned Aramset.
“That’s right,” I said. “I will be there.”
Before the sun rose I was standing in a war chariot, light and tough, beside a nut-brown Egyptian who lashed the four powerful chargers along the royal road northward. I carried nothing but the clothes I had been wearing and an iron sword, Lukka’s own, given to me by the Hittite captain as I took my leave of him. And the dagger had been my companion for so long that it had left its imprint on my right thigh.
We raced furiously along the road, kicking up a plume of dust behind us, the horses thundering along the packed earth, my charioteer grunting and puffing with the exertion of controlling the four of them.
We stopped at royal relay posts only long enough to change horses and take a bite to eat and a sip of refreshing wine.
By dawn of the second day my charioteer was exhausted. He could hardly drag his stiff and sore body from the chariot when we stopped at the halfway point. I left him at the relay post there. He protested. He begged me to let him continue, saying that the prince would have him flogged to death for abandoning me. But there was no sense taking him farther.
I took the reins in my own hands. I had watched him long enough to know how to handle the horses. Fatigue clawed at my body, too, but I could consciously damp down its warning signals and pour more oxygen into my bloodstream by hyperventilating as I drove four fresh animals pell-mell into the brightening morning.
The river was on my left, and I passed many boats floating downstream on the Nile’s strong current. Not fast enough for this mission. I cracked my whip over the horses’ ears and they strained harder in their harnesses.
At a bend in the road I happened to turn and glance back behind me. Another rooster tail of dust rose behind me, far back at the horizon. Someone was following me in just as mad a hurry as I was. Had the prince sent troops to back me up? Or could it be Menalaos rushing to rescue his wife? Either way, it would be help for me. Then another thought struck me: Could it be followers of Nekoptah, rushing to back him ?
As the sun set, I drove madly through a village of small houses, scattering the few people and children on the main road, and past a mile or so of precise formal gardens bordered by rows of trees and gracefully laid-out ponds. The temple of Osiris stood in their midst, facing a long rampway that led to the river. A single boat was tied up at the pier.
A half-dozen guards in bronze armor stood before the temple’s main gate as I pulled up my lathered horses and jumped from the chariot.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” demanded their leader.
I was willing to fight them if I had to, but it would be quicker and easier if I could avoid it.
“On your knees, mortals!” I boomed, in my deepest voice. “I am Osiris, and this is my temple.”
They gaped at me, then laughed. I realized that I was caked with dust from the road, and hardly the glorious radiant figure of a god.
“You are one of the foreigners that my lord Nekoptah told us would try to enter the sacred temple,” said the guard leader. He drew his sword and the others moved to surround me. “For your blasphemy alone, you deserve to die.”
I took a deep breath. There were six of them, wiry little Egyptians with deep-brown skins and even darker eyes, their chests protected by armor, conical bronze helmets on their heads, and swords in their hands.
“Osiris dies each year,” I said, “and each time the sun goes down. I am no stranger to death. But I will not be killed at the hands of mortals.”
Before he could react I snatched the sword from his hand and threw it toward the river in a high arc. Its bronze blade caught the last rays of the dying sun. They stared as it arced high overhead. Before they could react I threw their leader to the ground and reached the next man. He went down with a blow to his head. By the time their leader had risen to his hands and knees I had decked all the rest of them.
I pointed at their leader, recalling the imperious tones that the Golden One had often used on me. “Stay on your knees, mortal, when you face a god! And be glad that I have spared your lives.”
All six of them pressed their foreheads to the dust, trembling visibly.
“Forgive me, O powerful Osiris…”
“Stand watch faithfully and you will be forgiven,” I said. “Remember that to tempt the wrath of the gods is to court painful death.”
Into the temple I strode, wondering in the back of my mind if a god ever ran. Not in front of worshipers, I supposed. Not bad for a man sent to this time as a mindless tool, a servant bereft of memory. I had risen to a maker of kings and a pretender of godhood.
Now I was bent on vengeance once more, this time not for myself but for an innocent fat priest and a faithful old bureaucrat, both murdered because they stood between Nekoptah and the power of the kingdom. I drew my sword and hunted the chief priest of Ptah in the temple of Osiris.
Through courtyards lit by the newly risen moon and past colonnaded halls lined with statues of the gods I strode, sword in hand. I came upon a row of small chambers, sanctuaries for various gods. Nekoptah was not in the shrine of Ptah, where I looked first. Then I saw that the shrine of Osiris had a small doorway at its rear. I went to it and pushed it open.
The three of them were there, standing beside the altar of Osiris, lit by the flames of lamps set into the walls: Nekoptah, Helen, and Menalaos.
The erstwhile King of Sparta was in full bronze armor, his heavy spear gripped tightly in his right hand. Helen, in a shimmering gown of silver-blue, stood slightly behind him.
“I told you!” shouted Nekoptah. “I told you he would come seeking the woman.”
The priest’s face was unpainted and his resemblance to Hetepamon was uncanny. Yet where the brother was smiling and amiable, Nekoptah was snarling and vicious. I noticed that his hands were bare, except for the three fingers where rings were imbedded too deeply in flesh ever to come off.
“Yes,” I said, more to Menalaos than Nekoptah. “I seek the woman — to return her to her husband.”
Helen’s eyes flared at me, but she said nothing.
“You took her away from me,” Menalaos growled.
“He slept with her,” said Nekoptah. “They have made a cuckold of you.”
I answered, “You drove her away, Menalaos, with your brutal ways. She is willing to be your wife now, but only if you treat her with love and respect.”