Our own chariot was now tearing along dangerously close to the edge of the ditch, but I managed to gather the horses and bring them back in hand.
'Whoa!' I slowed them, and turned to look back. A cloud of dust hung over the ditch where the Hyksos chariot had disappeared. I brought my team down to a trot. The river-bank was two hundred paces ahead, and nothing stood hi our way to safety.
I turned for one last look behind me. The Hyksos archer, who had fired his arrow'at me, lay in a crumpled and broken heap where he had been thrown. Lord Intef lay a little further from the edge of the ditch. I truly believe I might have left him there if he had not stirred, but at that moment he sat up and then pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.
Suddenly all my hatred of him came back to me with such force and clarity that my mind seethed with it. It was. as though a vein had burst behind my eyes, for my vision darkened, and was glazed over with the reddish sheen of blood. A savage, incoherent cry burst from my throat, and I wheeled the horses in a tight circle until we were headed back towards the causeway.
Lord Intef stood directly in my path. He had lost his helmet and his weapons in the fall, and he seemed half-dazed, for he swayed upon his feet. I whipped the horses up into a gallop once more, and the heavy wheels rumbled forward. I aimed the chariot directly at him. His beard was dishevelled and the ribbons in it sullied with dust. His eyes also were dull and bemused, but as I drove the horses down on him, suddenly they cleared and his head came up.
'No!' he shouted, and began to back away, throwing out his hands towards me as if to fend off the massive carriage and the running horses. I aimed directly for him, but at the last moment, his dark gods defended him one last time. As I was right upon him, he threw himself to one side. I had seen him staggering and I had supposed that he was weak and helpless. Instead, he was quick and nimble as a jackal pursued by the hounds. The chariot was heavy and unwieldy, and I could not turn it swiftly enough to follow his side-step and dodge.
I missed him and went on by. I wrestled with the reins, but the horses carried me on a hundred paces before I could get them under control and swing the heavy vehicle round again. By the time we came around, Intef was running for the shelter of the ditch. If he reached it, he would be safe? I realized that. I swore bitterly as I drove the team after him.
It was then that his gods finally abandoned him. He had almost reached the ditch, but he was looking back over his shoulder at me, and he was not watching his footing. He ran into a patch of clay clods, hard as rocks, and his ankle turned under him. He fell heavily but rolled back on to his feet like an acrobat. He tried to run again, but the pain in his broken ankle brought him up. He hobbled a pace or two and then tried to hop forward towards the ditch on one leg.
'You are mine at last!' I screamed at him, and he spun around to face me, balanced on one leg as I drove the chariot down on him. His face was pale, but those leopard eyes blazed up at me with all the bitterness and hatred of his cruel and twisted soul.
'He is my father!' my mistress cried at my side, holding the prince's face to her bosom so that he would not see it. 'Leave him, Taita. He is of my blood.'
I had never disobeyed her in my life, this was the first time. I made no move to check the horses, but gazed into Lord Intef's eyes, for once without fear.
At the very end, he almost cheated me again. He flung himself sideways, and such were his agility and his strength that he twisted himself clear of the truck and the wheels of the chariot, but he could not quite avoid the wheel-knives. One of the spinning blades hooked in the fish-scale links of his coat of mail. The point of the Joufe tore through the armour and hooked in the flesh of his belly. The knife was spinning and his entrails snagged and wrapped around it, so that his guts were drawn out of him, as though he was one of those big blue perch from the river being disembowelled by a fishwife on the market block.
He was towed along behind us by the slippery ropes of his own entrails, but he fell slowly behind as more coils and tangles of his gut were torn from his open stomach cavity. He clutched at them with both hands, as they were stripped out of him, but they slid through his fingers like some grotesque umbilical cord that bound him to the turning wheel of the chariot.
His screams were a sound that I wish never to hear again as long as I live. The echoes of them still sometimes haunt my nightmares, so that in the end he inflicted his last cruelty upon me. I have never been able to forget him, as I would so dearly have wished.
When at last the gruesome rope by which he was being dragged across the black earth snapped, he was left lying in the centre of the field. At last those cries of his were stilled, and he lay without movement.
I pulled up the horses and Tanus slid down off the. back of his mount and came back to the chariot. He lifted my mistress and the prince down and held them close to his chest. My mistress was weeping.
'Oh, it was so terrible! Whatever he did to us, he was still my father.'
'It's all right now,' Tanus hugged her. 'It's all over now.'
Prince Memnon was peering back over his mother's shoulder at the sprawling figure of his grandfather with all the fascination that children have with the macabre. Suddenly he piped up in that ringing treble, 'He was a nasty man.'
'Yes,' I agreed softly, 'he was a very nasty man.'
'Is the nasty man dead now?'
'Yes, Mem, he is dead. Now we can all sleep better at nights.'
I had to drive the horses hard along the river-bank to catch up with our departing flotilla, but at last I drew level with Kratas' galley, and he recognized us in the unfamiliar vehicle. Even across that wide stretch of water, his astonishment was apparent. Later he told me that he had believed we were safely aboard one of the leading ships of the flotilla.
I turned the horses loose before I left the chariot. Then we waded out into the water to reach the small boat which Kratas sent in to pick us up.
THE HYKSOS WOULD NOT LET US GO that easily. Day after day, their chariots pursued our flotilla down both banks of the Nile as we fled southwards.
Whenever we looked back over the stern of the Breath of Horus, we saw the dust of the enemy columns following us. Very often the dust was mingled with the darker clouds of smoke that rose from the towns and villages on the river-banks which the Hyksos burned as they sacked them. As we passed each of the Egyptian towns, a flock of small craft sailed out to join our fleet, so that our armada increased in numbers with each day that passed.
There were times, when the wind was unfavourable, that the columns of chariots overhauled us. Then we saw then-cohorts gleaming on the banks on either side of us, and heard their harsh but futile jeers and challenges ring out across the water. However, eternal Mother Nile gave us her protection, as she had over the centuries, and they could not reach us out on the stream. Then the wind would veer back into the north and we drew ahead of them once more, and the dust-clouds fell back on to the northern horizon.
"Their horses cannot keep up this chase much longer,' I told Tanus on the morning of the twelfth day.
'Don't be too smug about it. Salitis has the lure of the treasure of Pharaoh Mamose and the legitimate heir to the double crown,' Tanus replied simply. 'Gold and power have a marvellous way of stiffening a man's resolve. We have not seen the last of the barbarian yet.'