Casting the Gods Adrift Read Online Free PDF Page A

ungodly place.
    I looked at the king’s chariot. His charioteer was busy talking to the other drivers. How could it hurt just to try?
    Up I stepped, on to the running board. One of the horses turned his head and snorted. The charioteer looked round and brandished his whip at me.
    The horses sprang straight from standing into a gallop. There was no time to jump off, no time to even think. The floor of the chariot seemed to be pounding my legs into my hips, jarring my kneecaps like hammer blows. I made a snatch at the reins, but they were tied to the chariot and not round my waist.
    Foam from the horses’ mouths came flying back and hit me in the face. Their black bodies creamed with instant sweat. I clung to the sides, but I was being pitched aboutlike the clapper in a bell, and my legs were not long enough to brace against the leather panels.
    Out over the red, cracked earth I hurtled, out over red earth crumbling away to sand and peppered with rocks. Past locust trees and thorn bushes and boulders shaped like skulls, away from the king’s party, away from the river, straight into the Red Country where no Egyptian chooses to go.
    My hold on the chariot could not last. When both wheels struck a rock, the front of the chariot reared up, and I went out of the back, heels-over-head, landing on my face. The horses galloped round in a wide arc and plunged back the way they had come. But they went without me.
    I was left alone on the red earth, scalding hot against my palms and thighs. I dragged myself on to my hands and knees, got up and ran a few steps. But, suddenly, the whole blue dome of the sky was singing and mouldering over with patches of black. I put my hand up to flick an insect off my neck and found it was not an insect but a trickle of blood from inside my ear. I felt violentlysick. The horizon sloped and doubled into two distinct lines. The ground lurched and I fell down again, not knowing how to get up.
    Lying on my back, a prey to scorpions and snakes, I called open-mouthed for my father. But I could not hear my voice. So I called inside my head instead – called on every god whose name I could remember: on Thoth, on Isis, on Apis and Bast and Sobek.
    But I knew, even as I called, that there were no gods in this place. It was empty, barren, scorched. As far as the eye could see, no living creature moved. There might be scorpions and snakes in the crevices of the cracked earth, but there was nowhere for a god to hide. Here was Death’s country, and I was alone in it. Only one thing ruled here, and that was the sun. The pharaoh was right. Out here, on the edge of the universe, there was only Aten. Of course he was right. Was he not a god himself? And gods must know these things. I could feel his beams scorching my face. I could feel his magic boiling my blood. I could see his hands reaching down from the sky – flails of light, crooks of sunlight. Aten was the same hereas over the town where I was born, or over el-Amarna, or over the cool reed marshes. He was everywhere; I could see that now. It was just that here he was plainer to see, closer to the earth.
    I found myself praying aloud. ‘O Aten, only ruler of Earth and Heaven; let me live, and I will worship you all the days of my life! O Aten, don’t let me die – not here in the Red Country, all alone and unburied!’
    The ground shook. A scorpion, walking slowly past my outstretched fingertips, paused, sting raised, at the vibration. I thought I was feeling the movements of the serpent Ipep under the earth, wrestling against the forces of light.
    Then a shower of red dust blew over me, and a chariot thundered past, and the pharaoh’s charioteer reined it in. The pharaoh himself came and leaned over me. I could not see his face with the midday sun blazing behind his head.
    â€˜There now, Tutmose. That will teach you not to overstep your mark.’
    â€˜There is only one god: Aten and Akhenaten his servant!’ I said