Desert God (25 page)

I felt a flicker of renewed hope; was it possible that the razor-sharp bronze had not sliced open his guts?

Tehuti was watching me intensely. ‘What are you doing, Taita?’

‘I am trying to estimate our chances.’

I bound the pad of lamb’s wool in place to cover the entry wound and I dribbled distillate of wine over it to subdue the evil humours. Then I moved around behind Zaras and placed one of my hands on each of his buttocks. I steeled myself and then drew them apart. I let out a soft sigh of relief. His fundament was clean and tight.

There was one more test I needed to make. I placed my hand on the small of his back and pressed down hard. There was a splutter of released gas from his bowels followed by a spurt of watery excrement and bright blood from his anus. The stink made both Tehuti and me wince.

Now I knew with fatal certainty that the sword had indeed pierced his entrails. I felt devastated with sorrow and despair. Zaras was a dead man. No surgeon in this world, however skilled, could save him; not even I. He belonged to Seth now.

I did not look up at Tehuti although I could feel that she was staring at me. I was helpless, and I hated that sensation. It is not something that I could ever become accustomed to.

‘Taita.’ She whispered my name. Still I could not raise my eyes to her and admit my inadequacy.

‘Please, Taita!’ Her voice rose slightly. ‘You can save his life, can’t you? You can save Zaras for me?’ I had to answer her; I could not allow her to suffer any longer.

I lifted my head and looked at her. I had never seen such suffering and sorrow as hers; and I have seen freshly created widows by the scores.

I formed the negative in my mind and on my tongue, and I even shook my head. But I could not utter the word ‘No’. I could not abandon these two young people.

‘Yes! I can save him for you, Tehuti.’ I knew it was a heartless thing to say. Finality is surely better than false hope, but I could not bear her anguish and despair.

So silently I begged the good gods to pardon my lie, and I set out to do battle with Seth for Zaras’ soul.

A
ll I knew for certain was that I had to work swiftly. No human body can survive such long-drawn-out anguish.

I had no other guidelines to follow. There was no other surgeon in this world who had ever dared to go where I was preparing to venture.

I had one remaining flask of the Red Sheppen that might be sufficient to keep Zaras unconscious for an hour at the longest. I would need all of it.

I would have to open the stomach cavity and find where Zaras’ entrails had been punctured. I would have to repair the sword-cuts by sewing them together. Then I would have to flush out the evil humours that had escaped from his bowels into his stomach cavity.

Fortunately, like all of us, Zaras had eaten little since leaving the Miyah Keiv. We were short of food, and I had rationed our stores strictly. His gut would not be full of waste. I had infusions of willow bark and cedar sap but insufficient quantities for the task of flushing out the poisons. The most efficacious of all was distillate of wine. I had only one small water-skin full of this. Both Tehuti and I washed our hands in a single small bowl of this precious liquid.

I had long ago discovered that heat will reduce if not destroy the humours. On my instructions two of my men set a large pot of water on the fire. When the water was boiling furiously I dangled my bronze surgical razors, needles and catgut sutures into it.

I forced another large dose of the Red Sheppen down Zaras’ gullet while Tehuti sponged his belly with the distillate of wine.

Then my hefty guardsmen pinned Zaras down once more. I placed a doubled leather pad between his teeth so that they would not crack and shatter when his jaws clamped down in a seizure of agony. All was in readiness. I could find no further excuse to delay longer.

I made the first long cut through the wall of his belly, from just below his belly button to the crest of his pubic bone. Zaras howled through his leather gag and he whipped his head from side to side.

I showed Tehuti how to hold the wound open by hooking her fingers into each side of my long incision and pulling the lips apart. I was now able to get both my hands into the cavity of his belly as deep as my wrists. I had a picture in my mind of the course that the sword blade had taken as it was driven into his belly, and I worked along this route.

Almost at once I found a perforation as long as my little finger in the slippery rope of his guts. The stinking debris of digested food was oozing from the aperture.

I sewed it closed with catgut and neat regular stitches of my curved bronze needle. Then I took the rubbery snake of the gut and squeezed it in my two hands, to make certain that there were no leaks. My suture was watertight, but the pressure forced the brown and turbid filth to squirt from three other cuts deeper in his bowels.

I sewed these smaller cuts closed, working with a delicate balance of speed to efficacy. I could see that Zaras was beginning to weaken under this extreme treatment that I was forced to inflict upon him.

By the time I was satisfied that I had not overlooked any other damage that the blade had caused, both Tehuti and I were inured to the faecal stench. Nonetheless, it was a constant reminder to me how vital it was to wash out all the humours from his body before I closed his gaping stomach cavity. Anything that stank so atrociously must be evil.

With Tehuti still holding his stomach open I took mouthfuls of the distillate of wine and squirted it through my pursed lips into the recesses and convolutions of his bowels. Then we rolled him on his side and drained the fluid out of his belly.

Then we washed out his guts again with boiled water which had cooled to body temperature, and drained that out of him.

Finally we washed him out with our own urine. This is one of the most effective recipes against the humours, but the urine must be fresh and uncontaminated by any other fluid or bodily substance. Ideally it should come directly from a healthy bladder without contacting the external sexual parts of the donor: the penis and foreskin of the male or the female labia.

With me this presented no difficulty. The removal of the emblems of my sex is such ancient history that their memory no longer causes me even a tremor. While I emptied my water into Zaras, Tehuti swabbed her own privates with a woollen pad soaked in the distilled wine; when I stood aside she squatted over Zaras and spread the lips of her vulva. Then she aimed a hissing stream into his belly cavity. When she had finished we rolled Zaras’ inert form on to his side to drain for the third and last time.

Then I closed up his belly, and with each stitch I recited a verse from the prayer for the closing of a wound.

‘I close your cruel red mouth, O evil thing of Seth! Leave this place. I command you: go!

‘Retreat from me, jackal-headed Anubis, god of the cemeteries. Let this one live.

‘Weep for him, gentle-hearted Hathor. Show him your mercy and ease his pain. Let him live!’

It was dark by the time that I had trussed up his belly with linen strips torn from the skirts of my robe and laid him on the litter in his shelter. Tehuti and I sat on each side of him ready to give whatever comfort and succour we could.

When Zaras in delirium began to rant at and struggle with the imaginary and real demons that crowded around his litter, Tehuti lay down beside him and took him in her arms. She held him tightly and sang to him.

I recognized the lullaby. It was one of those that Queen Lostris had sung to Tehuti when she was an infant. Gradually Zaras quietened.

His men built their watch fires in a circle around the shelter in which we waited with Zaras. I think they prayed for him as we did. I heard the murmur of their voices throughout the long hot night.

Towards the dawn I fell asleep. There was nothing further that I could do other than husband my reserves for the ministrations which I knew I would soon be called upon to render.

I
felt a small hot hand tugging at my shoulder and I came awake instantly. I saw through the chinks in the roof of our shelter that morning was not far off. I had slept only briefly, but I felt as guilty as if I had committed murder.

‘Taita, wake up. You must help me.’ I could hear the effort she was making to prevent herself from weeping.

‘What is it, Princess?’

‘His skin is on fire. Zaras is burning up inside. He is so hot it is almost painful to touch him.’

I had a cedar-wood taper to hand. I thrust the tip of it into the dying coals of the fire and blew upon it. When it burst into flames I lit the oil lamp at the head of the litter and I bent over Zaras.

His face was flushed and shining with sweat. His eyes were open but unseeing with delirium. When we tried to hold him still and quieten him he lashed out at us. He rolled his head from side to side and screamed curses at us.

I had been expecting this. I knew well the burning fever which heralds the onslaught of the evil humours. I had seen many cases that exhibited almost exactly the same symptoms. They had all ended in the death of the patient. But I had prepared my first line of defence.

I summoned my six stalwarts and between us we were able to truss Zaras in a cocoon of saddle blankets, so that he was unable to do more than move his head. Then we soaked the blankets with buckets of water and fanned them to speed up the evaporation. This reduced the temperature of Zaras’ body until he was shivering with the relative chill.

We kept this up through most of the morning, but by noon Zaras’ strength was fading. He was following the same course that all my previous patients with the humours had taken. He no longer had the strength to resist the treatment I was forcing upon him.

He uttered no sound but the chattering of his teeth. His skin had taken on a pale blue tinge.

We unwrapped him and Tehuti took him in her arms again and looked at me across his wet and quivering body.

‘You said that you could save him, Taita. But now I understand that you cannot do so.’

The depths of her despair cut me as deeply as the Jackal’s sword had wounded Zaras.

In the time of the exodus when we Egyptians were driven from our homeland by the Hyksos invaders we escaped south through the cataracts of the Nile into remotest Africa. For many wandering years we survived in the wilderness, until we grew strong enough to return and win back our birthright. During that time I learned to know and understand the black tribes. They had strengths and special skills that I envied. I was particularly attracted to the Shilluk tribe, and I made many friends amongst them.

One of these was an ancient medicine man named Umtaggas. Others of our company looked upon him as a primitive witch doctor who consorted with demons. They considered him to be barely one level above the wild animals that abounded in that far southern land. But I came to realize that he was a sage with a grasp of many things that eluded us interlopers from the north. He taught me more than I was able to teach him.

When the weight of his years finally overwhelmed him and he was only days away from dying he pressed into my hands a leather bag of sun-dried black mushrooms of a type that I had never seen before. They were covered in a thick green mould. He cautioned me not to remove this mould, as it was an essential element of the medicine’s healing powers. Then he instructed me how to prepare from these fungi a draught which he warned me killed more often than it cured. I should employ it only when it was all that stood between my patient and the void.

Over the years since the return to our very Egypt I have dared to use this infusion on only seven occasions. In each case my patient was moribund, with merely the weight of a sunbird’s feather preventing him from being tipped over the edge of eternity. Five of my patients expired almost as soon as the draught passed their lips. One struggled on the brink for ten days, slowly gaining ground all the time until the end came abruptly and unexpectedly.

Only my seventh patient has survived the arrow through his lung and the evil humours that followed that wounding. He has grown strong again. He still lives in Thebes and each year on the anniversary of what he refers to as my miracle he comes to visit me with all his grandchildren.

I know full well that one out of seven is hardly a score to boast about, but I could see that Zaras had about one hour of his life left to live, and Tehuti was looking at me with those huge reproachful eyes.

There was less than a handful of the mouldy mushrooms remaining in the gazelle-skin bag. I boiled them in a copper pot of water until the juice was black and sticky. Then I allowed it to cool before I placed a wooden wedge in the corner of Zaras’ jaw to keep his mouth open while I spooned the concoction into him. I have tasted a drop of this elixir on only one previous occasion. It was an experiment which I have no intention of ever repeating.

Zaras’ reaction to the taste accorded with mine. He fought so wildly that it took my six helpers and Tehuti to subdue him, and then he vomited up more than half of what I had forced him to swallow. I scraped up his returns and fed them to him a second time. Then I removed the wedge from between his jaws, and held his mouth closed until I was certain that my precious mushrooms remained below decks despite his repeated attempts to offload them once more.

Then Tehuti and I wrapped him in saddle blankets and sent the others away. We sat one on each side of him and waited for him to die.

By nightfall he seemed to have achieved this state. Despite the blankets his temperature had plummeted to that of a freshly netted catfish and his breathing was almost inaudible. The two of us took turns in placing an ear to his mouth to listen for it.

A little after midnight when the moon had set Tehuti told me firmly, ‘He is cold as any corpse. I have to lie with him to keep him warm.’ She removed the bloodstained and ill-fitting clothes that I had collected for her from the carcasses of the Bedouin and climbed under the blanket with Zaras.

Neither of us had slept for the last three days, but we did not sleep now, and we did not talk. There was nothing left for us to say to each other. We had given up hope.