“You!” came the bass rumble of the steersman. “Sit down, man. What do you think you’re doing?”
Khai half-turned, saw the steersman’s puzzled eyes upon him. He turned back to the river and in the corner of his eye was aware that Menon Phadal was now awake, on his feet, pointing, shouting.
“He’s going to jump! Grab him—you slaves, there—grab him!”
But then he spotted the third mass of floating reeds, seventy or eighty feet away, bobbing in breeze-eddied mist. The hands of the slaves flanking him reached clumsily for him and the voice of the scar-faced young Nubian whispered: “Jump, man—now!”
He snatched up his stone and leaped up onto the gunwale. Hands snatched at his legs, deliberately avoided clasping him. He jumped—
The water closed over his head and he sank; but already he cradled the stone between his thighs and sought to break the hold of the faulty manacle. The water was green and deep and the slow current tended to set him turning. He balanced himself, tried to maintain his sense of direction as he fought with the manacle, flexing his wrist again and again and jerking the wide metal band left and right until his wrist bled.
Then, as his feet struck bottom and sank in slime, at last the manacle snapped open. He kicked himself off in what he prayed was the right direction and struck out strongly with his legs. Already his lungs craved air, but for the moment he fought the urge to swim for the surface and headed across the bottom. By now, the slave ship would have drifted on downriver. How far, Khai wondered?
Now, with his lungs near-bursting, he angled his body for the surface and almost immediately saw stretched before him the rope which anchored the third marker to the bottom. He caught at it, followed its sinuous length hand over hand up out of the depths, until his head at last broke surface inside a bobbing tangle of papyrus leaves and stems. At its upper end the rope was tied to a leather bladder to give it buoyancy, and now Khai clung to this life-saving bubble as he trod water and scanned the surface of the river through a screen of reeds.
The slave ship was a mere shadow drifting away into a thin wall of rapidly dispersing mist. Figures moved on its deck and voices were blown back to Khai by the rising wind from downriver.
“Who was he? Why did he jump?” That was Menon Phadal. A lesser voice, almost inaudible and broken by the sound of wavelets lapping in the reeds, answered:
“He was just a lad … no family ... acting strange lately … out of his head … drowned himself.” But then the slave ship was gone and Khai heard no more.
V
On Mhyna’s Barge
Mhyna’s barge was a curious affair, much like the slave ship in shape and construction, but very much smaller. Having the lines of a wide-beamed felucca with a shallow draught, the boat looked for all the world like a huge leaf which had started to curl up at the edges. And like a leaf, it was far more seaworthy than it looked. The port and starboard reed platforms were bound to a ribbed central keel formed of a single up-curving plank of great thickness, which supported a central mast with a scarlet lateen sail. From a large bronze ring at the top of the mast, a dozen taut ropes came down to the outer circumference of the barge’s deck, where they were fastened to the tightly-bound reed gunwales. The barge was constructed in such a way that lading it with a cargo only served to compress its decks and make them more watertight.
Looking up through the network of ropes from where he lay on his back between bundles of crocodile skins and jars of oil and wild honey, Khai felt that he stared up at the center of some monstrous spider’s web—except that the craft’s mistress, Mhyna, could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as a monster! She was dusky, krinkly haired, with laughing slanted eyes and long, handsomely proportioned legs. Plainly, Mhyna was a child of several races; basically Khemish, there was also that of the East in her. Yes, and something of the jungle, too.
An expert sailor, Mhyna handled the vessel’s long-bladed, oarlike rudder with practiced ease as the prevalent wind from the north filled the barge’s sail and drove it south against the river’s flow. “Experts” of a later age would doubtless deny the existence of Mhyna’s vessel—certainly of its sail—for their records would seem to show that sails were unknown on the Nile until shortly before the unification of Egypt under Menes. However that might be, Mhyna’s ancestors had been plying the river under sail for more than four hundred years....
“Are we clear of Asorbes yet?” Khai asked the girl, uttering the first words he had dared to speak to her since she had pulled him from the river something less than an hour ago. Lying as he was, with only his face uncovered and the rest of him under the freshly-tanned hide of a beast, he was unable to see that the massive-walled city now lay well in the wake of the craft.
Instead of answering him, Mhyna lashed her steering-oar in a neutral position and came amidships. Walking the central plank with the grace and agility of a cat, a few paces brought her to where she stood directly over her “stowaway.” She loosened one of the ropes that controlled the angle of her small sail, then stood there with the rope wrapped round her arm, her legs braced and spread, her back to the mast, gazing down at Khai through brown eyes which were far from innocent.
He averted his own eyes a little, keeping his gaze from her legs where they were parted, from the narrow strip of linen that passed between them and only just concealed the darkly bulging triangle of hair beneath. It was not that the girl was indecently or even immodestly dressed (indeed, the ladies of Asorbes seemed almost to vie with one another to see who could leave the most flesh uncovered’), but it was the angle at which she leaned against the mast and the way her short skirt rose up when she braced her sun-browned legs against the barge’s slow sway.
In contrast to many of Khem’s women, Mhyna kept both breasts covered. A wide scarf looped over her shoulders from the back of her neck, crossed over her breasts and passed behind her back where its ends were tied. Upon her brow she wore a scarlet headband which looked to be of the same coarse material as the sail, and in her ears were rings of gold that caught the morning sun. Her feet were bare, with toenails painted a bright red.
She looked, Khai thought, like some female pirate from the Great Sea. Certainly the glint in her eyes was piratical—or at least mischievous—as she shielded them with a hand to scan the banks of the river. And at last, as Khai began to move his cramped body and relieve the ache of lying so still, she spoke.
“Best stay quiet for now, little friend, for while we’ve left Asorbes behind, still there are plenty of soldiers on the banks. They seem to be searching the reeds for something—perhaps for you’”
Again she scanned the riverbanks, then stood up straight to wave gaily at someone unseen. “If you keep them amused,” she explained, “they don’t bother you ” But a moment later, when Khai began carefully to raise himself up on one elbow to have a look for himself, she put a foot on his chest and pushed him back. “No,” she said, “you must keep your head down! We’d both be in for it if you were seen “
Khai could not know it, but Mhyna was playing a game with him. The banks were almost deserted, with no single soldier in sight. In a field of cropped grass on the west bank, a shepherd boy paused for a moment to wonder who the girl was that waved to him from her barge, then went back to tending his sheep.
“Why are you helping me?” Khai asked after a little while.
Again she stared down at him, spreading her legs wider yet and squirming her hips, ostensibly to scratch her backside on the mast. Finally, she shrugged. “I have two brothers doing time on Khasathut’s pyramid. When I come up the river from Wad-Gahar, the slaves of Asorbes bring me word of them— just as they brought me your bow and your knife last night. The slaves help me, and so I help them.”