Casting the Gods Adrift by Geraldine McCaughrean Read Free Book Online Page A

queen, as my brother laid down his lyre. ‘Come here, Ibrim.’
    He rose and crossed the deck, unerringly,to the source of her voice, kneeling down and bowing his face to the deck. She reached to one side. ‘A token of our pleasure,’ she said. And put the faience cat into his outstretched hands.
    I felt the hairs rise on my head. I felt my father beside me stiffen like a scorpion, back arched. I saw my brother return to his hassock and cradle the cat tenderly in his lap, exploring its features with his delicate, musician’s fingers: the paws, the haunches, the coiled tail, the pointed nose, the face. His fingers stopped at the unexpected roughness of the mud-clogged eyes, and, with two twists of the little finger, he pushed the two clay plugs inside, into the hollow body of the Nile-blue cat.
    I leaped along that deck like a flying fish, snatched the figurine out of his hand and flung it over the side. As the Nile-blue cat sank beneath the bile-brown Nile, little black shapes wriggled away into the water, but only I saw them go.
    There was a stunned silence. Ibrim felt about him, open-mouthed, appalled that someone had robbed him of his preciousgift. Father slumped sideways against the cabin wall, as if asleep. I turned round to face the astonished gaze of the entire royal family.
    â€˜I’m sorry!’ I gulped. ‘I’m so sorry! But it was one of mine. I made it long ago. When I was an unbeliever in the one god! It was a likeness of Bast, you see! It was an idol to the goddess Bast. Not just a cat. An idol – an insult to Aten. I couldn’t watch my brother kiss a pagan idol!’
    Ibrim looked up to me, with his blind eyes, uncomprehending. Ankhesenpa-aten scowled at me, narrowing her painted eyes. But Nefernefruaten-Nefertiti inclined her head graciously and asked my father if he would care for a drink of water. The pharaoh reached out a hand and creamed some melted wax from his wife’s shoulder to smear on his forehead. The mosquitoes were starting to bite.
    I think such fear had gone through my father that all his hatred melted in the heat of it. He had almost killed his own son. Almost but not quite. Like that scented wax trickling in soothing drops down theroyal skin, the relief cooled Harkhuf’s incandescent brain and left only a kind of emptiness – a vacuum.
    On the way home, we did not talk of anything that had happened, and Ibrim never was given a proper explanation. But when we got to the house, I straightaway presented Father with the stela I had carved for him. I believe my fear of him had also melted in the heat of the day.
    He held it between his two hands as though I had just introduced him to his grandchild for the first time. Here was his promise of immortality. He looked from the stela to me, from me to the stela. ‘I do not deserve this,’ he said, fingering the figures of the gods, the hieroglyphs that spelt out his name, and he wept with pleasure.
    His humility did not last for long. Soon he was considering the practicalities. How could it be got to Abydos? Who would set it up for him when he was dead? Who could be trusted with such a beautiful, such an exquisite work of art? That is how he described my handiwork! I thought my heart would crack. Not so much with pride,for I no longer craved his praise, but with a kind of aching tenderness.
    â€˜I shall take it there for you, Father,’ I said.
    He stared at me. Unspoken in his face was the knowledge that I did not believe in his gods, that I had gone over to the king’s religion, that I was an Aten man. He did not hate me for it. He just did not entirely know me any more. ‘Do you promise?’ he asked, like a child seeking reassurance.
    â€˜I swear it, Father,’ I said. ‘It will stand there for ever, and your soul will travel there and be met by Osiris, Father of the Dead. By Aten, I swear it.’ As I said it, I wondered what Aten would think, who was even then