The Quest

'Eos stole from your own memories of Lostris, and gave them back to you in their most convincing, compelling form.'

'But even I had forgotten most of those details.'

'It was you who averred that we forget nothing. Every detail remains.

It requires only occult skills, such as Eos possesses, to retrieve it from the vaults of your mind, as you retrieved from me my memories of Eos, her voice as she uttered the incantation to fire.'

'I cannot accept that it was not Lostris,' Taita moaned softly.

'That is because you do not want to accept it. Eos seeks to close your

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mind to reason. Think a moment how cunningly the image of the girl on the dolphin was woven into her evil schemes. While she lured and distracted you with false visions of a lost love, she sent her spectral serpent to destroy me. She used your dream as a distraction.'

Now, upon the escarpment of the delta, Taita was confronted with the vision again: the image of Lostris, once queen of Egypt, whose memory still ruled his heart. This time she seemed even more perfect.

He felt his resolve and reason wavering, and tried desperately to check himself. But he could not prevent himself looking into Lostris's eyes.

They were filled with enchanted lights, all the tears and smiles of her lifetime in their depths.

'I reject you!' he told her, in a voice as cold and stern as he could muster. 'You are not Lostris. You are not the woman I loved. You are the Great Lie. Get you hence into the darkness from which you sprang.'

At his words the sparkle in Lostris's lovely eyes was replaced by a vast sorrow. 'Darling Taita,' she called to him softly. 'I have existed without you through all the sterile and lonely years that we have been parted.

Now, when you are in such mortal and spiritual danger, I have come far to be with you again. Together we can resist the evil that hovers over you.'

'You blaspheme,' he said. 'You are Eos, the Lie, and I reject you. I am protected by the Truth. You cannot reach me. You cannot harm me.'

'Oh, Taita.' Lostris's voice fell to a whisper. 'You will destroy us both.

I am in peril too.' She seemed burdened by all the sorrows that had afflicted mankind since the beginning time. 'Trust me, my darling. For both our sakes you must trust me. 1 am none other than the Lostris you loved and who loved you. You called to me across the ether. I heeded your call and I have come to you.'

Taita felt the foundations of the earth tremble beneath his feet but he steeled himself. 'Out, cursed witch!' he cried. 'Begone, foul minion of the Lie. I reject you and all your works. Plague me no more.'

'No, Taita! You cannot do this,' she pleaded. 'We have been given this chance, this one chance. You must not refuse it.'

'You are evil,' he told her harshly. 'You are an abomination from the void. Go back to your foul abode.'

Lostris moaned and her image receded. She faded in the same way that her star had often been eclipsed by the light of coming day. The last whisper of her voice came back to him from out of the night: 'I have tasted death once, and now I must drink the bitter cup to the dregs.

Farewell, Taita, whom I loved. If only you could have loved me more.'

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Then she was gone and he sank on to his knees to let the waves of remorse and loss break over his head. When he had the strength to lift his head again, the sun had risen. Already it had climbed a hand's span above the horizon. Windsmoke stood quietly beside him. She was dozing, but as soon as he stirred she threw up her head and turned her eyes on him. He was so reduced that he had to use a rock as a mounting platform to reach her back. He swayed there, almost losing his seat, as she started along the path towards the encampment.

Taita tried to order the jumble of emotions that filled his head. One salient fact emerged from his confusion: it was the manner in which Windsmoke had stood calmly, without the least sign of perturbation, during his encounter with the phantom Lostris. On every other occasion she had detected a manifestation of evil long before he had become aware of it himself. She had bolted when the moon was devoured, yet she had shown only mild interest in the wraith of Lostris and her phantom steed.

'There could not have been evil in them,' he began to convince himself. 'Did Lostris speak the truth? Did she come as my ally and friend to protect me? Have I destroyed both of us?' The pain was too much to bear. He pulled Windsmoke's head round and drove her into a full gallop back towards the delta. He checked her only when they burst out on to the rim of the escarpment, and swung down from her back on the exact spot at which Lostris had vanished.

'Lostris!' he shouted to the sky. 'Forgive me! I was mistaken! I know now that you spoke the truth. Verily and indeed you are Lostris. Come back to me, my love! Come back!' But she was gone and the echoes mocked him: 'Come back … back . . . back .. .'

They were so close to the holy city of Thebes that Taita ordered Meren to continue the night march even after the sun had risen. Lit by its slanting early rays the little caravan descended the escarpment and struck out across the flat alluvial plain towards the walls of the city. The plain was desolate. No green thing grew upon it.

The black earth was baked hard as brick and split with deep cracks by the furnace heat of the sun. The peasant farmers had abandoned their stricken fields and their huts stood derelict, the palm-leaf thatching falling in clumps from the rafters, the unplastered walls crumbling. The bones of the kine that had died of famine littered the fields like patches

of white daisies. A whirlwind swayed and wove an erratic dance across the empty lands, spinning a column of dust and dry dhurra leaves high into the cloudless sky. The sun smote down upon the parched land like the blows of a battleaxe upon a brazen shield.

The men and animals of the caravan were as insignificant in this sullen landscape as a child's toys. They reached the river and halted involuntarily upon the bank, caught up in horrified fascination. Even Demeter dismounted from his palanquin, and hobbled down to join Taita and Meren. At this point the riverbed was four hundred yards wide.

In a normal season of low Nile the mighty stream filled it from side to side, a torrent of grey, silt-laden waters, so deep and powerful that the surface was riven by shining eddies and dimpled with spinning vortices.

At the season of high water the Nile could not be contained. She burst over her banks and flooded the fields. The mud and sediment dropped by her waters was so rich that they sustained three successive crops during a single growing season.

But there had been no inundation for seven years and the river was a grotesque travesty of its former mighty self. It had been reduced to a string of shallow stinking pools strung out along its bed. Their surface was stirred only by the struggles of dying fish, and the languid movements of the few surviving crocodiles. A frothy red scum covered the water, like congealing blood.

'What causes the river to bleed?' Meren asked. 'Is it a curse?'

'It seems to me that it is caused by a bloom of poisonous algae,' Taita said, and Demeter agreed.

'It is indeed algae, but I have no doubt that it is unnatural, inflicted on Egypt by the same baleful influence as stopped the flow of the waters.'

The blood-coloured pools were separated from each other by the exposed banks of black mud, which were littered with stranded rubbish and sewage from the city, roots and driftwood, the wreckage of abandoned rivercraft and the bloated carcasses of birds and animals. The only living things that frequented the open sandbanks were strange squat creatures that hopped and crawled clumsily on grotesque webbed feet over the mud. They struggled ferociously among themselves for possession of the carcasses, ripping them apart, then gulping the chunks of rotting flesh. Taita was uncertain of the creatures' nature until Meren muttered, in deep disgust, 'They are as the caravan master described them to me.