His chin dipped slightly. “You are my friend,” he agreed.
“You know me well enough to realize that I will not harm you. Nor will I knowingly harm your people, the people of the Two Lands.”
“Yes,” he said drowsily. “I know.”
“You can trust me.”
“I can trust you.”
Slowly, slowly I forced his body and his mind to relax. He was almost asleep, even though his eyes were open and he could speak to me. His conscious mind, his willpower, were allayed. He was a frightened man, and he badly needed a friend he could trust. I convinced him not only that he could trust me, but that he must tell me what it was that was frightening him.
“That’s the only way I can help you, my friend.”
His eyes closed briefly. “I understand, friend Orion.”
Gradually I got him to talk, in a low monotone that I hoped could not be overheard by Nekoptah’s spies. The story he unfolded was as convoluted as I had feared. And it spelled danger. Not merely for me: I was inured to danger and it held no real terror over me. But Helen had inadvertently stepped into a trap that Nekoptah had cunningly devised. Loathe him though I did, I had to admire the quick adroitness of his mind, and respect the strength and speed with which he moved.
It had been whispered up and down the length of the kingdom — so Nefertu told me — that King Merneptah was dying. Some said it was the wasting disease; others whispered that he was being poisoned. Be that as it may, the true power of the throne was being wielded by the king’s chief minister, the obese Nekoptah.
The army was loyal to the king, not a priest of Ptah. But the army itself was weak and divided. Its days of glory under Ramesses II were long gone. Merneptah had allowed the army to erode to the point where most of the troops were foreigners and most of the generals were pompous old windbags living on past victories. Where the army had slaughtered the Sea Peoples who raided the delta in Ramesses’s time, now the barbarians sacked cities and terrified the Lower Kingdom, and the army seemed unable to stop them.
Nekoptah did not want a strong army. It would be an obstacle to his control of the king and the kingdom. Yet he could not allow the Sea Peoples to continually raid the delta country; the Lower Kingdom would rise up against him if he could not defend them adequately. So the chief priest of Ptah hit upon a brilliant plan: send the newly arrived Hittite contingent against the Sea Peoples, as part of a new army expedition to the delta. Let the barbarian leaders see that the man who stole Helen from the Achaian victors at Troy was now in Egypt. Let them know that, just as they suspected, Helen was under the protection of the Kingdom of the Two Lands.
And let them know, by secret messenger, that Helen would be returned to them — if they stopped their raids on the delta. Even more: Nekoptah was prepared to offer Menalaos and his Achaians a part of the rich delta country as their own, if they would guard the Lower Kingdom against attacks from other Peoples of the Sea.
But first Menalaos had to be certain that Helen actually was in Egypt. For that, Orion and his Hittites would be sent into the delta as sacrificial lambs, to be slaughtered by the barbarians.
And more.
Unrest against Nekoptah’s usurpation of power was already being felt in the city of Menefer, the ancient capital, where the great pyramids proclaimed the worship of Amon. The chief priest of Amon, Hetepamon by name, was the main plotter against Nekoptah. Should Orion get out of the battles of the delta alive, he was to bring Hetepamon back to Wast with him. As a guest, if possible. As a prisoner, if necessary.
Of course, if Orion should be killed by the Sea Peoples, as seemed likely, someone else would be sent to pluck Hetepamon from his temple and bring him to the power of Nekoptah.
A neat scheme, worthy of a cunning mind.
I leaned back in my chair and relaxed my mental grip on Nefertu’s mind. He sagged slightly, then took in a deep breath of revivifying air. He blinked, shook his head groggily, then smiled at me.
“Did I fall asleep?”
“You drowsed a bit,” I said.
“How odd.”
“It was a very tense meeting this morning.”
He got to his feet and stretched. Looking out over the courtyard below us, he saw that the sun was nearly setting.
“I must have slept for hours!” Turning to me, he looked genuinely puzzled. “How boring that must have been for you.”
“I was not bored.”
With a testing, tentative shake of his head, Nefertu said, “The rest seems to have done me good. I feel quite refreshed.”
I was pleased. He was too honest a man to carry the burden of Nekoptah’s scheming within his mind, without a friend to share the problem.
But Nefertu still looked slightly puzzled when he took his leave of me. I asked him to meet me for breakfast the next morning, so I could tell him about our royal evening.
Supper with the King of Egypt, the mightiest ruler of the world, the pharaoh who had driven the Israelites out of his country, was a strange, disquieting affair.
Helen was tremendously excited about meeting the great king. She spent the entire afternoon with female servants running about, bathing and scenting her, tying her hair in piles of golden curls, making up her beautiful face with kohl for her eyes and rouge for her cheeks and lips. She dressed in her finest flounced skirt of golden threads and tinkling silver tassels, decked herself with necklaces and bracelets and rings that gleamed in the lamplight as the last rays of the sun died against a violet western sky.
I wore a fresh leather kilt, a gift from Nefertu, and a crisp white linen shirt, also provided by the Egyptian. I strapped my dagger to my thigh as a matter of course.
Helen opened the door that connected our two rooms and stood in the doorway, practically trembling with anticipation.
“Do I look fit to meet the king?” she asked.
I smiled and replied truthfully, “The proper question would be, is the King of Egypt fit to meet the most beautiful woman in the world?”
She smiled back at me. I went to her, but she held me at arm’s length. “Don’t touch me! I’ll smudge or wrinkle!”
I threw my head back and laughed. It was the last laughter to come from me.
An escort of a full dozen gold-clad guards took us through narrow corridors and flights of stairs that seemed to have no pattern to them except to confuse one who did not know the way by heart. Thinking back to my morning’s meeting with Nekoptah, and to what Nefertu had unknowingly revealed to me, I realized that Helen and I were truly prisoners of the chief priest, rather than guests of the king.
Instead of a magnificent dining hall filled with laughing guests and entertainers who regaled the company with song and dance while servants carried in massive trays heaped high with food and poured wine from golden pitchers, Merneptah’s supper was a quiet affair in a small windowless chamber.
Helen and I were brought by the guards to a plain wooden door. A servant opened it and beckoned us into the smallish room. We were the first there. The table was set for four. A chandelier of gleaming copper hung above the table. Serving tables stood flat against the walls.
The servant bowed to us and left by the room’s only other door, set in the farther wall.
Once again I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. We were being watched, I knew. There were paintings on the walls, scenes of royal hunts with the king — drawn much larger than everyone else — spearing lions and leopards. I saw the glint of coal-black eyes where a lion’s tawny ones should be.
“Is hospitality in Sparta so cold that the king would leave his guests alone in a room without food or drink or entertainment?” I asked Helen.
“No,” she said, in a small voice. She seemed vastly disappointed.